Dexter the dog.  Image: KXTV

Dexter, a spaniel long-haired chihuahua mix who was severely injured by explosives that were strapped to his body and detonated, was reunited with his owner, Shukriyyah Albaaqee, after she saw reports of the dog on the news.

Police in Stockton, Calif. responded to reports on Wednesday that an explosive device had detonated and discovered an injured dog at the scene. They then discovered that someone had strapped the device to the dog and set it off.

The dog was rushed to a local animal hospital, where he was given the nickname “Rocket.” According to ABC’s Sacramento affiliate, KXTV, the dog was injured but in stable condition. He had a large, deep wound, roughly 10 inches long.

“It’s quite a miracle that he’s still alive right now,” a veterinary worker told KXTV. “He’s a trouper. He’s a tough little guy.”

Employees at the animal hospital did not believe Dexter was a stray.

Reports of the incident on the news led Shukriyyah Albaaqee to the animal hospital where she provided pictures and home video as proof that Dexter indeed belonged to her.

Dexter will stay at the animal hospital until at least next Tuesday while he heals.

RedRover, a national  nonprofit animal protection organization based on Sacramento, is offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever strapped the explosive to Dexter and detonated the device.

If you have any information regarding the situation, please contact the Stockton Police Dept at (209) 937-8377.

(Image credit: Publico.Es)

A “gay” penguin couple in a Madrid zoo has been given an egg of their own to care for after six springs of building nests together and being disappointed their nests were empty.

Inca and Rayas, the Gentoo penguins at Madrid’s Faunia Park have been inseparable for six years, according to the U.K.’s Telegraph. This year, the zoo gave them an egg to take care of.

“We wanted them to have something to stay together for — so we got an egg,” zookeeper Yolanda Martin told the Telegraph.  “Otherwise they might have become depressed.”

Martin said the attention the birds have attracted has been “lovely,” though the penguins are not actually gay.  They’re more like the best of friends, living cooperatively because they’re in the same enclosure.

“When you put things in captivity, odd things happen,” Kevin McGowan of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., told ABCNews.com. “The way penguins work is they do get paired for a long time. Basically, the only other penguin they care about is their mate, so it’s important for them to find somebody who’s compatible, and if you don’t have a normal upbringing then it’s difficult to say how ‘normal’ they can be.”

The duo has enthusiastically taken to the roles of prospective parents. Inca has taken on the “female” role, spending his days devotedly sitting on the egg, according to the paper. Rayas has taken the “male” role, guarding the next and storing food in his beak as he prepares to feed the chick with regurgitated fish.

“In birds, it doesn’t matter what sex you are. Both sexes are perfectly capable and absolutely necessary to raise a penguin bird,” McGowan said. “It’s not like mammals where only one sex can feed.”

Two other “gay” penguin couples have made headlines recently.

In China, a popular “gay” penguin couple was given a newly hatched chick to care for in December. But a couple in Toronto, Buddy and Pedro, were separated and placed with female partners. The zoo said they warmed up to their new mates.

The Toronto zoo provoked a public outcry in November when it announced that the male penguins would be separated and paired with female penguins for mating.

Humans love to line up in front of the glass walls at penguin zoo exhibits, staring at the antics of the black-and-white, two-legged creatures.

But what about when the tides are turned, when penguins get a chance to meet the strange humans,  observing them for the first time?

That moment was captured on camera by a man traveling to penguins’ home habitat, Antarctica.

“I was on a tour with friends in Antarctica when we visited a penguin colony,” the visitor, Joel Oleson, explained.  “Our guide told us not to approach the penguins, but that it was okay for them to approach us.”

“I laid down to seem non- threatening, and the baby penguin approached me,” said Oleson, a self-described “travel junkie” who has traveled  to over 100 countries since 2008 and blogs about his adventures at Travelingepic.com.  Watch the video to see what happened next.

(Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

What our great failure in the 1930s may teach about facing the rapid assault of manmade global warming  (Or “Hell is the truth seen too late.”)

Nature’s Edge Notebook #28

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

(This continues Notebook #27, “‘Hug the Monster’ for Realistic Hope in Global Warming – or How to Transform your Fearful Inner Climate.”)

Sometimes, a little humor is indispensible.

Matthew White uses it elegantly in the title of his fascinating new, big and easy-to-read reference book.

“The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities” is a bright door stopper and mind opener.

That jaunty title, which often brings a smile to those to whom I mention it, even hints at one reason we may have evolved humor in the first place: A little sugar can make the worst sort of important news at least palatable, so we can swallow it, get it down to where we can try to digest it.

And with a growing number of the world’s climate scientists now speaking publicly about the grave global “catastrophe” and the imminent “threat to global civilization” now building in the form of manmade global warming, White’s book offers a simple, painful lesson.

It reminds us that humanity has often and recently failed to prevent collective calamity, even when many people can see it coming and try to warn everyone.

In other words, just because we see an immense and possibly preventable cataclysm approaching, it’s important to realize that it doesn’t mean we’ll prevent it, necessarily … however unbearable the thought of that possibility may be.

“Hell Is Truth Seen Too late.” – 18^th Cent. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes

Given what the world’s climate scientists are now begging us to understand, it seems only logical that before we can begin to glimpse and assess any reasons for realistic hope in the rapidly growing climate crisis, it is important to see the true size of the problem.

And, as these scientists often tell us, the problem’s biggest unknown is “What will the humans do?”  Will humanity respond adequately in time to make temperatures level off well within the lifetime of today’s teenagers?

Harvard historian and social anthropologist Timothy Weiskel, in his courses on the many aspects of the crisis of manmade global warming, sometimes quotes the insight of 18^th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes that “Hell is truth seen too late.”

The world’s climate scientists are in effect telling us that one part of the truth we must now try to see is humanity’s ability — or lack of it — for collective prevention of enormous manmade disaster, atrocity.

The record is worrisome.

What a Librarian Knows About Human Folly… and WWII

White, a librarian by profession, writes of great horrors with buoyant disinterest, almost as if he is simply bemused at human folly.

He defines “atrocities” as necessarily manmade, not natural, and ranks them according to a single simple measure — the number of people killed.

Writing in a crystal clear style, White is open about the methodology with which he clarifies blizzards of data, and about his reasons for arriving at the numbers he presents.

He’s had decades of experience that includes maintaining the online “Historical Atlas of the 20th Century” and refereeing disagreements among a wide range of parties about actual numbers of people killed in various atrocities.

“Atrocitology is at the center of most major historical disputes,” he says.

Atrocitologist and Necrometrician of Hemoclysms and Multicides — Ranking the “One Hundred Deadliest”

White is described in the forward (by Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker) as a “self-described atrocitolgist, necrometrician, and quantifier of hemoclysms” (massive bloodbaths).

In White’s list of “The One Hundred Deadliest Multicides,” there’s a tie for second and third place.

Both are in Asia, with 40 million killed in each:

• by the bloody conquering armies of Mongol warlord Genghis Khan in the 21 years from 1206 to 1227.
• and much more recently, by the ruthless dictatorship of Chinese ideologue Mao Zedong in the 27 years from 1949 to1976.

In first place — history’s greatest atrocity — is World War Two.

In just six years, from 1939 to 1945, 66 million people were killed.

That includes the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, the quarter million Roma Gypsies also slaughtered or shipped to death camps, as were many others, plus millions killed in death marches, the Sino-Japanese conflict and countless other WWII conflicts and battles, bombings and assaults, sieges and famines and other deprivations and disruptions in all hemispheres, east and west, north and south, on land and sea.

In all, WWII killed some 46 million civilians and 20 million soldiers.

(That 66 million does not include, says White, the 20 million people killed within the Soviet Union by the homicidal policies and massacres directed by dictator Joseph Stalin against his own citizens during the 25 years from 1928 to 1953.   These “internal” atrocities of Stalin are in a tie for sixth and seventh place on White’s list with the Taiping Rebellion in China, which also killed 20 million people over the 14 years from 1850 to 1864. White’s list of the 100 deadliest atrocities is full of surprises.   See more examples in Footnote below.)

For one thing, White’s numbers are plain evidence of humanity’s collective tendency to down-play horrendous threats, even when we see them coming.

Survivors of the Holocaust and of many other WWII atrocities offer heartbreaking accounts of loved ones or neighbors lost because they just couldn’t believe that the worst would happen — that it would get so bad.

And though survivors, serious scholars and responsible leaders are still working to better understand why the many warnings throughout the 1930s failed to prevent this greatest atrocity of all, popular imagination often tends to forget such lessons in the comforting glow of the fact that “We won the war,”  some even calling  it “the last good war” — though most all of the survivors of its brutal battles, unspeakable death camps and endless dislocations whom this reporter has ever spoken with would not say there was anything good about it.

This is of course not to take the slightest measure of honor from those who finally had to sacrifice their health or, by the millions, their lives, to stop the grim pathology that had overtaken the world by Sept. 1, 1939, by which point there seemed no other possible way to stop it.

Nonetheless, reflecting on this greatest collective failure — the failure throughout the 1930s to prevent the greatest atrocity — may help suggest what failures at prevention might now be under way, despite the clear and widely reported rapid rise of manmade global warming.

After all, the failure to prevent WWII occurred recently, roughly speaking, within our own era.

It was well within the lives of people alive today who can still tell us firsthand about specific WWII horrors they experienced as young adults or children.

Weiskel, in a recent lecture on the failings of modern American news media adequately to engage and foresee the realities of various approaching crises, cites a passage in John F. Kennedy’s 1940s book, “Why England Slept.”

It was written as John F. Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard in 1940 and then immediately published with the help of his father, Joseph Kennedy, American Ambassador to the U.K.   Ambassador Kennedy is reported to have encouraged appeasement of Hitler, countering the urgent advice of Britain’s Winston Churchill.

Churchill, alarmed by what was clearly coming, had already published a book entitled “While England Slept” in 1938, the book whose title the young JFK referenced two years later in his.

Weiskel selects this sentence from JFK’s book (which was published during the Battle of Britain but before Pearl Harbor) to project on a screen in front of his classes today (bolded highlight mine):

“To say that all the blame must rest on the shoulders of Neville Chamberlain or of Stanly Baldwin, is to overlook the obvious.  As the leaders, they are, of course, gravely and seriously responsible.  But, given the conditions of democratic government, a free press, public elections, and a cabinet responsible to Parliament and thus to the people, given rule by the majority, it is unreasonable to blame the entire situation on one man or group…”

A Free Press, Public Elections, A Cabinet Responsible to the People, Rule by Majority…

… and yet, England… and the United States… failed to prevent that greatest atrocity.

A free press, public elections, a cabinet responsible to parliament and thus to the people, and rule by majority were no guarantee.

But even without the benefit of the hindsight we now have about the horrors of WWII, a large segment of people, as historians have shown, could make out enough of the rough outlines of upheavals to come to try to at least get out of the way and in many cases prepare for what they realized the overall global society was not about to prevent.

The Rapidly Approaching Climate Catastrophe

But this time, say today’s climate scientists, the rapidly approaching climate catastrophe threatens to kill far more people than all of White’s 100 Deadliest atrocities combined.

Estimates heard in private conversations with scientists and economists reach even into the billions of people who could perish well within this century if the warming is not somehow controlled.

This reporter has heard figures in measured conversation, for example, such as this: If humanity does not now manage somehow to drastically cut carbon emissions so that the global temperature levels off at around 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial times, but reaches instead 4 degrees centigrade, it could mean some 4 billion people dying within this century because the world couldn’t grow enough food in such heat and the drought it will bring — rice harvests, for one, would be decimated.

The Most Important “What If”

The “What ifs” of the 1930s are of course infinitely variable and impossible to conclude.

What if fewer editors had watered down reporters’ submissions that cleanly delineated the direction of the military and ideological build-ups in Europe and Asia, or played those stories differently or more prominently in their media?

What if, in the two years leading up to his third election in 1940, Franklin Roosevelt had been more open with Americans about the inevitability of entering the European conflict, a notion then so unpopular with many voters?

What if, in the 1930s, the many forces and groupings of democracy at which the young JFK was pointing his finger in 1940 (possibly trying to protect, or downplay the position of, his own father) had somehow come together in a way that ultimately prevented the greatest atrocity of all, WWII.

All we can know for sure is that they didn’t.

But to ponder now what those failures may have been could, of course, help to instruct us, give us ideas about what we may now be missing.

It might alert us to our own tendencies to down-play or ignore fast-approaching disaster that appears too frightening, or too big, to think about, much less report to viewers and readers, or explain to constituents.

Then there are the “What ifs” that are flipped toward the future, and asked in the negative:

What if we don’t try to report or explain the full scale and challenge of the climate problem?… just as a number of professionals in the 1930s apparently didn’t with the challenge they faced.

Knowing the general size of the problem, painful or frightening as it may be, would seem clearly necessary for any professional journalist or government leader trying to report on or assess the chances of any realistic hope we think we may glimpse amid all the bad news.

It would obviously help us get our minds around it, at least.

And that’s a beginning.

To be continued…

———————

Footnote:

“White’s list of the 100 Deadliest Atrocities is full of surprises.”

A few examples:

• The Atlantic slave trade ranks 10^th, with 16 million killed (in 1452-1807).
• The American Civil War, (in 1861-65) ranks 65^th, with 695,000 killed.
• There’s a two-way tie for 94^th and 95^th place, with 350,000 each for:
• – the Roman-Jewish wars (in 66-74 and in 132-135)
• – the sanctions imposed by many nations under the UN Security Council against dictator Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (in 1900-2003)
• There’s a five-way tie for the end of the list (#96 though #100) with 300,000 each, killed by atrocities stretching from the Second Persian War (480 to 479 BCE) to those “killed internally” by dictator Saddam Hussein (1970-2003), a conflict White labels as “Saddam vs. everyone.”

—————-

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By ABC’s Cecilia Vega and Alex Waterfield

Gray whales are starting to make a strong comeback in the Pacific thanks, in part, to Mexico’s aggressive eco-tourism program, where whale-watching is regulated, but a new threat is emerging some 10,000 miles away.

Hunters once pushed these gentle giants to the brink of extinction — at one point, there were only 500 gray whales left. Now there are an estimated 20,000 of them and they are the first marine mammal to be removed from the endangered species list. Baja, Mexico, researchers monitor the whales’ movements and growth, and even use crossbows to gather small samples of flesh to test how healthy they are.

But while the gray whales may be protected in the Baja lagoons where they mate and raise their young, environmentalists are concerned about a looming danger to the animals’ feeding grounds in the Arctic, where Shell Oil is scheduled to begin exploratory drilling this summer.

“Shell’s oil and gas leases exactly overlap with the critical feeding area of the gray whale,” World Wildlife Fund spokeswoman Leigh Henry said.

The process of looking for oil means sending sonic booms, or shock waves, into the sea floor, and environmentalists worry the noise might affect the whales’ survival. These animals make deep sounds to do almost everything — navigate, find food, find mates — and the deafening booms could make the whales become disoriented and mothers could even be separated from their calves, Henry said.

“Essentially when you have all this noise muting and masking their ability to hear, they can’t do any of those things,” she said. “It’s like them trying to go about their daily lives with a bucket on their head.”

A researcher kisses a gray whale off the coast of Mexico. Credit: Tabata Olavarietta

Shell declined “Nightline’s” request for an interview, but said in a statement that their data shows whales are “generally undisturbed by industry activity.” The company pointed to another whale species, the bowhead, whose population has grown despite drilling in their feeding grounds.

“We would not consider working in the Alaska offshore if we were not confident in our ability to do so without negatively impacting … marine mammals,” Shell said in the statement.

But it’s not just the noise Henry is worried about. She said Shell is not prepared if a massive oil spill were to happen, and pointed to the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

“It’s a little unreasonable to think that we’re going to be prepared to clean up an oil spill in the Arctic,” she said. “Obviously, Shell has insurmountable resources to do this work and we would like them to step up and take responsibility and ensure that any operations they undertake in the Arctic have minimal impact on the whales.”

Shell argues that it has taken responsibility, engineering a containment system like the one that was ultimately successful in stopping the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. The company added that it has also “assembled an … oil spill response fleet that is second to none in the world.”

Environmentalists remain skeptical, and they hope to generate enough public support to delay or even halt the drilling, but the Obama administration has already approved it.

“What are we going to do after we drill in the Arctic?” Henry said. “It’s a short-term solution to a long-term problem and we need to be looking at alternative fuel sources.”

The two minutes of footage posted to YouTube by the Wildlife Conservation Society shows a troop of eight Cross River gorillas. Researchers say the number of the critically endangered primates has dwindled to only 250 to 300 left on the planet.

Found mostly on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon, the Cross River gorilla, which is a subspecies of the Western gorilla, is the most endangered of the African apes.

“The footage provides us with our first tantalizing glimpses of Cross River gorillas behaving normally in their environment,” Christopher Jameson, director of the Takamanda Mone Landscape Project, told OurAmazingPlanet.com. “A person can study these animals for years and never even catch a glimpse of the gorillas, much less see anything like this.”

At one exhilarating moment in the footage, a silverback gorilla beats his chest as he races across the static shot. Another gorilla walks across the screen seconds later displaying a missing hand, which might have been lost when caught in a trap.

Cross River gorillas are extremely shy, and are known to flee at the first sight of a human, hence the lack of footage of the species. Hunting them for bush meat and a loss of their natural habitat has led to their decline in numbers. In an attempt to protect the gorillas, Cameroon’s government created the Takamanda National Park in 2008.

The Wildlife Conservation Society released a statement saying that the group that captured the new footage with one of four camera traps set up in the Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary.

(Getty Images)

A Metaphor to Change Fear Into Action and Extinguish the Panic and Despair so Deadly in a Great Crisis

Nature’s Edge Notebook #27

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

Sometimes, the right metaphor can save your life.

“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force trainers to those headed into harm’s way.

The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.

If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost.

But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.

Around the world, a growing number of people are showing signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to be a great crisis facing us all.

Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective civilization.”

Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.

For many years now, the worlds scientists and economists have depicted  upheavals in security plans, financial networks, and food and water systems due to the rapidity with which annual global temperature is rising as a result of excess carbon emissions.

But those who have also hugged this monster are finding that doing so transforms the crisis:

• for government leaders around the world, into a wide field of ways to inspire action as they begin to find reasons for what the Holocaust scholar Philip Hallie calls “realistic hope.”
• for climate scientists, economists and other academic specialists, into the most fascinating, challenging and complex puzzle they’ve ever faced together — fascinating and challenging, not least because its biggest unknown is “what will the humans do?”  (The world’s scientists have been the heroes and leaders of this story from the start. They’ve had to live longest with the fear it can induce.)
• and for journalists, into what we call “a great story” – and please note that for us professional reporters, the word “story” is a term of art. This story is exciting professionally for its enormous and unprecedented journalistic problems, and for the variety it presents to our imaginations and skills, our art and our craft.  It may even be greater, in some ways, than the approach of World War Two must have been for journalists in the 1930s, given the projected effects of the rapid global change the world’s climate scientists report is now under way.

The climate scientists and some other experts have actually been hugging this monster, transforming their fearful inner climate into action, doing so for some time, albeit privately.

Past Silence ‘for Fear of Paralyzing the Public’

A few years ago, this reporter heard a prominent climate and environment scientist speaking at a large but off-the-record conference of experts and policy makers from around the world who had gathered at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

(The conference was held under “Chatham House Rules”; in hopes of encouraging vigorous and free discussion, they allow the content of talks and discussions to be reported later but not the identity of the speakers or participants.)

He told us that he and most other climate scientists often simply didn’t want to speak openly about what they were learning about how disruptive and frightening the changes of manmade global warming were clearly going to be for “fear of paralyzing the public.”

That speaker now has an influential job in the Obama administration.

But even The White House is showing signs of more open discussion about climate change in the near future. President Obama recently told Rolling Stone that global warming may well be an issue even during his reelection campaign, which would likely highlight the question of just how how serious — even frightening — it is.

References in some media to looming catastrophic consequences of climate change seem to this reporter to be more frequent.

A few days ago in the New York Times, a thoroughgoing front page article about global warming quoted a range of scientists on the overall effect of the global upheavals that can be expected from manmade global warming. Here are three excerpts — bolded highlights mine:

• “‘The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,’ said Raymond T. Pierre-humbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. ‘Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.’” (Recent scientific studies report the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is proving to be higher than expected.)
• “Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late.”
• “‘Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, “We’re sure it’s not a problem,” ‘ said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. ‘It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.’“

‘A Risk to the Collective (Global) Civilization’

Global warming’s “risk to the collective civilization” (meaning global civilization) has been continually spoken of in secret or unofficial or private conversations among engaged climate scientists and government and policy leaders around the world.

Such terms — catastrophe, threat to civilization itself — have been commonplace in carefully worded private discussions among peer-reviewed experts that this reporter and other journalists have often experienced and sometimes engaged in.

Careful not to prompt destructive panic, nor to lose credibility, responsible experts have been careful to temper their public depictions of what the world’s climate science has been revealing about the worst effects — if humanity does not handle the problem immediately — of the rapid climatic and oceanic changes already under way.

But clearly, with so enormous and inclusive a truth as this one, the proven details of which are widely available to anyone with access to the Internet, “the truth will out, we see it day by day,” as English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote long ago.

And so, inevitably, experts and leaders around the world are beginning to be more open about the frightening prospects.

However, in doing so, they are also beginning to demonstrate how to hug this monster — to embrace the fear it instills. They need to have done so to speak with credibility.

This is something leaders may do almost instinctively, as in the famous case of FDR.

‘Nothing to Fear But…’ – Leaders’ Meta-Psychology in a Grave Crisis

“We have nothing to fear… but fear itself!” — FDR’s most famous words. Soon after he was elected president in the midst of the Great Depression, he delivered them before the newsreel cameras with an intentionally determined and jaunty self-confidence.

He was using even his voice and body language to demonstrate the affect — the attitude — with which to hug the monster, fear.

It was a form of meta-psychology, asking Americans to think about their own psychology, in this case their fear, asking them to get their minds around it, embrace it, and, in a way, to become their own shrinks — to examine their fears and try to convert them into effective action, to get on with it.

This reporter has seen a variety of leaders in the United States and other countries in recent years begin to do something similar regarding manmade global warming — in speeches at the global climate summit in Durban, South Africa, in December 2011, at a variety of policy, scientific and academic conferences, and in news reports about leaders at all levels from local activists and mayors to governors to heads of state.

(It’s even tempting to suspect that the growing number of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies now flowing out of Hollywood are somehow a response to the growing concern and quiet fear that more people may be feeling as the worrisome news from climate scientists increases alongside inescapable and increasingly erratic and extreme weather and shifting seasons.)

“Hug the Monster: How Fear Can Save Your Life” is the title of a chapter in The Survivor’s Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, the book in which this reporter, after five years of wrestling with the enormous and daunting story of manmade global warming, first learned the phrase “Hug the monster” — a phrase that immediately struck me for its pertinence to the climate story.

The book was written by Ben Sherwood after he served as executive producer for ABC News’ “Good Morning America,” during which, as he explains it, he had noticed so many survivors of different kinds among the guests on the TV show that he set out to discover and report what was known in different companies and disciplines about who survives different kinds of crises and why.

He published it in 2009, two years before he became president of ABC News, and established a related website, www.thesurvivorsclub.org.

Nowhere in the book does Sherwood mention climate change, but here’s a passage from the end of that chapter that struck this reporter for its relevance to the increasingly public questions about how our global civilization will deal with the advance of global warming:

Fear as a Security System — When Properly Used (Air Force Mantra)

“Without a doubt, fear is the most ancient, efficient, and effective security system in the world. Over many thousands of years, our magnificently wired brains have sensed, reacted, and then acted upon every imaginable threat. Practically speaking, when you manage fear, your chances improve in almost every situation. But if your alarms go haywire, your odds plummet.”

He concludes:

“For survival then, here’s the bottom line. If you’re scared out of your mind, try to remember this Air Force mantra: Hug The monster. Wrap your arms around fear, wrestle it under control, and turn it into a driving force in your plan of attack. ‘Survival is not about bravery and heroics,’ award-winning journalist Laurence Gonzales writes in his superb book Deep Survival. ‘Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear: They turn it into anger and focus.’ The good news is that you can learn to subdue the monster and extinguish some of the clanging bells. The more you practice, the easier it becomes. Indeed, with enough hugs, you can even tame the beast and turn him into your best friend and most dependable ally.”

As a growing number of professional journalists around the world are finding, the story of manmade global warming (and the other evil twin of excess carbon emissions, the rapid acidification of the oceans) is unprecedented in its scale, almost “too big to cover,” and frightening.

But there are now signs that, little by little, voices and personalities are beginning to emerge around the world who are starting to hug this monster, manage the fear, and turning the emotions it causes into action.

For us journalists, the core responsibilities of our profession include knowing how to report unpleasant but important facts — and to do so in ways that nonetheless engage groups small and large, even in a sense “entertain” them, as in entertaining the mind, and to try to win their tacit appreciation for doing so.

Obviously, when the news is horrendous, such as, say, a looming world war or the rapid climb in global temperature and ocean acidification, our job includes the very essence of what it means to hug the monster.

But as this reporter and a growing number of others now working the story can report, once we do so, manmade global warming transforms into “a great story” (in our profession’s term of art) — and even one in which it is possible to glimpse a number of reasons for “realistic hope.”

To be continued…

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Sinkhole that appeared May 3, 2012 in Windermere, Fla. Image: ABC News

The Lambro family of Windermere, Florida woke Thursday morning to a massive sinkhole in their backyard, forcing them to evacuate their home for fear that it would be sucked in by the gaping hole.

So what exactly is a sinkhole, and what caused it to appear suddenly in this quiet Florida neighborhood?

“A sinkhole is basically a closed depression that forms in the ground,” said David Weary, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The simple explanation is that the ground surface falls into a void.”

But what causes that void? Weary says there a both natural and man-made triggers.

“Usually you get a collapse because something occurred that transported the material, creating the void that the sinkhole falls into,” Weary said. “If there’s a cave underground filled with soil and sediment and you get an episode of high rainfall or a change in groundwater flow, the dirt that filled the void will be hollowed. Once it hollows out close to the ground surface, it becomes thin enough that it can’t support what is on top of it and it falls in.”

It is often a man-made structure that causes the change in groundwater flow and leads to a collapse.

In 2010, an entire three-story apartment building was sucked in by an enormous sinkhole.  That case was what Weary called a “man-caused sinkhole.”

“There was actually a big sewer line that’s way deep down in the ground and it’s leaking. So you can actually see there was a series of sinkholes that collapsed all along that sewer line.”

Some areas are more prone to natural sinkholes than others.

“Karst terrain is a type of landscape that is characterized by having natural caves and springs and underwater groundwater flow,” Weary said. “And almost all of Florida is classified as karst terrain,” Weary said.

According the Weary, other areas in the U.S. that are prone to sinkholes include parts of Pennsylvania and Kentucky — but most sinkholes are concentrated in Florida because of the karst landscape.

But sinkholes are becoming more common in areas not thought of as at risk.

“In nature, sinkholes collapse fairly rarely but it seems to happen more and more in developed areas because people redirect storm water and it sets them off.”

Weary said it’s hard to know whether the recent Florida sinkhole was naturally occurring or caused by human activity, because Florida is so predisposed to sinkholes.

“It could have been anything from them directing rain runoff in some funny place to it being a leaky water pipe or a storm sewer. Or it could have been natural and they just happened to build a house on top of a covered, hidden sinkhole,” Weary said.

If you see a sinkhole, he said, stay far away.

“Don’t get near the edge because commonly, the void underneath it is bell-shaped so it’s really unsafe to be anywhere near the edge in case it continues to collapse.”

(Getty Images)

Four simple graphs give the lie to the denialist canard that rapid global warming has stopped… or even reversed. — “A half a truth is a whole lie.”

Nature’s Edge Notebook #26

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

This flying duck is expected by the world’s climate scientists to soon crash and burn.

The four simple graphs below instantly give the lie to Climate Canard No. 2 — the claim that “in the past decade it just hasn’t warmed much at all” … or “global warming has stopped” … or even that “global temperature is now cooling.”

As explained in previous Nature’s Edge Notebook #24, the origin of the English word canard (meaning “an unfounded or false, deliberately misleading story”) probably stems from the French phrase, vendre un canard moitié, which means “to half-sell a duck; to swindle.”

It’s akin to an old proverb quoted by widely respected climate scientist Michael Mann:

“A half-truth is a whole lie.”

The half truth in this canard (actually, it’s a far tinier fraction than that) is that the long-term rise in the overall annual global temperature has leveled off since the year 2000.

Problem is, the aggressive rise in global temperature never goes up in a smooth line, straight or curving, when plotted from year to year, and was never expected to.

The world’s alarmed climate scientists have long set a tougher standard for “global climate trends,” requiring averages over 20 or 30 years, and their alarm is only growing.

As you can see in graphs below, global temperature is always an up and down of sharp zig-zags … until you measure it in averages of 10 years or more, as climate scientists have always insisted as they try to show the public the frightening big picture that professional climatologists must live with every day.

This first graph combines data from three U.S. federal agencies, all widely respected by climate scientists around the world:  NCDC, NESDIS and NOAA — the National Climate Data Center; the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Note its statement that, since 1980, every year in each succeeding decade is warmer than the average temperature of the entire previous decade — rising steadily through the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s.

Note also that when graphed this way, with red bars, you get a sense of how the problem is “piling up” — in the increasing red area of the graph from left to right as the years pass.

This reflects that fact that, as climate scientists have found, much of the excess heat-trapping greenhouse gas CO2 emissions from human activity stays in the air for hundreds of years, piling up heat on top of more heat.

(The black “baseline” in the center of the graph is the average temperature of the entire century 1901-2000)

The slight dip in the 1950s is believed by climate scientists to have been caused at least partly by the post-World War II economic boom, which produced great amounts of industrial smog whose tiny particles reflect warming sunlight back into outer space — as does the thick smoke
from volcanoes.

This next graph, plotted by climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, looks more closely at global temperature since 1970, going year-to-year.

It exposes “the myth of cooling” — that version of Canard No. 2 in which denialists even claim that “global temperature is cooling,” which they do by cherry picking only the past five or six years, which is a tiny fraction of the temperature record:

Alarmed climate scientists have always predicted there would be “brief pauses and dips” in the global air temperature rise … and that even as they were occurring, new global warming would still be working its way through deep ocean currents, as has also proved to be the case.

Medical metaphors often arise as scientists explain global warming — including with this canard that “the earth is cooling.”

Like Saying Your Terribly Sick Child Is Probably OK

“It would be like saying your terribly sick child is probably OK because her fever of 104.3 has briefly dropped to 104.2,” as veteran climatologist Richard Somerville, emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego California has told ABC News.

This next graph shows the global annual average temperature over a much longer period, from 1800 to 2010.

It shows global land-surface temperature readings compiled by four separate institutions.

Three of them are in the United States (NASA-GISS, NOAA, Berkley) and one in the United Kingdom, (HadCRU — the Climate Research Unit of the Hadley Centre of the UK’s “Met Office,” which deals with meteorological and climatic observations and related studies.)

Notice how the gray “uncertainty intervals” grow less and less as the four different readings merge in the 1850s.

Notice also how the larger swings up and down, partly due to natural variability, grow smaller and smaller, finally settling into a steady rise in global temperature over the past 40 years, starting in about 1970.

This graph is from a PowerPoint presentation used by Stanford Professor Naomi Oreskes, author of “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”

Again, as with the similar decline and plateau in the first graph above, the dip in the global temperature from about 1942 to 1970 is believed by climate scientists to be due partly to the intense industrial activity of World War Two and the economic boom that followed.

The gray and black particles in the smoky emissions from factories actually help cool the earth by reflecting some of the warming sunlight back into outer space, thus preventing it from hitting the earth where it changes into the invisible infrared light that is trapped by greenhouse gasses, warming the air.

Finally, here is a global temperature graph from NOAA and NCDC that plots the global temperature rise from 1880 to 2010.

It shows how closely the temperature has risen in step with increasing CO2 emissions, starting in about 1970.

This graph matches the increasing rise in global temperature to the cause firmly established by the world’s peer-reviewed scientists — excess CO2 injected into the atmosphere by human activity.

As with the first graph above, the center-line is the average global temperature of the century from 1901 to 2000. (This graph is different from some other similar graphs in that it averages temperatures over both land and the oceans.)

Not the Elephant in the Room, but the One We’re Inside Of

These graphs, whose simple readings are accepted without any controversy by virtually all of America’s and the world’s professional climate scientists and other responsible authorities, show that, as one observer has put it, manmade global warming is not the elephant in the room, it’s the elephant we’re all inside of.

Veteran climate scientists in the United States, frustrated with the falsely politicized climate science arguments that are fueled partly by canards such as this one, sometimes remark that “there are no Republican thermometers and Democrat thermometers,” while pointing out that graphs like these (which are simple to understand and are being taught to middle school students around the world) are essentially just careful professional readings from thousands of
different thermometers around the world.

A Very Temporary Duck — in Onrushing Effects of Global Warming

Even without the plain evidence of these simple temperature graphs, the continually advancing effects of manmade global warming are clear in the ever increasing news flooding in everywhere from around the world.

Taken together, they also put the lie to the empty claims that the warming has stopped.

They are countless. But just for example, scientists have now discovered that Antarctic Ice Sheet “shelves” (giant slabs of ice sticking out into the ocean) are continually melting from beneath, faster than previously thought, due to increasing exposure to warming sea currents — a melting that continues steadily out of sight below regardless of cold spells in the air above them.

A new study in the journal Science firmly links manmade global warming to ever greater threats of extreme weather — drought, fierce winds and intense rainfall and flood — affecting large regions in the United States and many other countries around the world, a trend we reported in the previous Nature’s Edge Notebook No. 25.

There are now countless other peer-reviewed scientific studies emerging daily around the world that show manmade global warming has not stopped at all, but is continuing its rapid rise.

Climate Canard No. 2 looks like a very temporary duck.

—————-
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                                                                                                 Image credit: Getty Images

The workers of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant received a very slimy surprise this week when they discovered hoards of jellyfish-like creatures clinging to the structure, leading to the shutdown of the plant.

The organisms, called salp, are small sea creatures with a consistency  similar to jellyfish.

The influx of salp was discovered as part of the plant’s routine monitoring system, according to Tom Cuddy, the senior manager of external and nuclear communications for the plant’s operator, Pacific Gas & Electric.

“We then made the conservative decision to ramp down the affected unit to 20 percent and continued to monitor the situation,” Cuddy said. “When the problem continued, we made another conservative decision that it would be safest to curtail the power of the unit.”

The salp were clogging the traveling screens in the intake structure, which are meant to keep marine life out and to keep the unit cool.

“Safety is the highest priority,” Cuddy said. “We will not restart the unit until the salp moves on and conditions improve. No priority is more important than the safe operation of our facility.”

The plant consists of two units. Unit 1 was shut down previously because of refueling and maintenance work and will not be functional for several weeks. Now that Unit 2 has been shut down because of the influx of salp, the plant has ceased all production.

Even with the Diablo Canyon plant out of commission, PG&E has pledged to continue production using other sources of power so that customers are unaffected by the closure.

“We’ve had salp cling to the intake structure before, but nothing to this extent,” Cuddy said.

The plant’s strategy? Simply wait until the salp move on and resume production once the filters are clear.