faulker083

It’s hard to keep your eyes on the ball when everyone starts throwing hundreds of balls on to the court. It’s hard to prioritize addressing Climate Change when the GOP and Trump are lobbing grenades each day onto the headlines. Our most cherished values are under attack and they all must be addressed: immigration, science, food programs, education, war against the media, our international reputation, the sanctity of the office of the Presidency, and who knows what else lurks in the heart of these clowns.   But even these every-freaking-day assaults must be viewed through the lens of Climate Change. For if we allow our attention to be diverted from addressing Climate Change, all other issues will be exacerbated or eliminated altogether because our life support system will be breaking down. Climate Change is an existential crisis requiring that we make massive shifts in the way we live, how we get energy, and how we treat our environment. Climate denial is a backfire-effect (when...

Our recent spate of hard storms and the public’s reaction to the government and power company response provides an interesting learning moment about the public’s expectation of preparedness in a time of Climate Change. Was Rochester Gas and Electric prepared for storms? Questions persist about whether the Rochester region's largest electric utility was prepared for the fury nature unleashed the past few weeks. Yet complete answers could be a long time coming for customers and citizens whose lives were upended by the storms and power outages. And while Rochester Gas and Electric's handling of the crisis is of immediate concern to many, more troubling may be questions about long-term preparation, including maintenance of the local electrical system. (March 17, 2017) Rochester Democrat and Chronicle) Many in the Rochester area were not happy with the response time or the infrastructure vulnerabilities revealed by these recent storms. Were our authorities ready? Were our infrastru...

According to  Carbonify.com , the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was 365.26ppm in 1998 when I began RochesterEnvironment.com . Today it’s 406.13ppm. In some places it’s projected to soon hit 410ppm. We have known for quite some time now that we are quickly warming up our planet, which is and will continue to affect all life on Earth, while increasingly making it problematic as to whether we can adapt. For ten thousand years of the Holocene, during which humanity thrived, our carbon dioxide concentration levels hovered around 280ppm. Then in the mid-1800’s our planet’s temperature took off. There is much about Climate Change that folks are debating and denying, but these figures on the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are pretty clear. Hard to squirm away from the math. Carbon Dioxide Could Reach 410 PPM This Month A never-ending stream of carbon pollution ensures that each year the world continues to break records for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This year...

Ever since humanity began large-scale industry, business folks have been duking it out with nature lovers. It would be convenient to entirely blame Pruitt and President Trump for attempting to gut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But this present crisis, where the EPA is getting eviscerated , where decades of good work by our top environmental agency is getting attacked by the Trump administration, is but a dramatic point along a continuum of our collective compliancy towards our life support system. For most of humanity’s existence, we have fought for our place in our environment among dangerous predators and hostile climates. Some time ago, our numbers grew and our ability to dominate and even subdue nature allowed our species to thrive. We discovered how to exploit the bounties of our environment and didn’t think much about replacing or compensating important components (think, forests) because it didn’t even occur to us until centuries ago that our resources were finite. ...

As I write, the worst possible candidate to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just got installed . It is terrible because it is via the EPA we get our legal authority to address Climate Change on a scale that will matter. States can do much, but it’s the feds that create a level playing field. So, Pruitt’s political (not scientific) confirmation could be a serious problem for our life support system. #ScienceMatters Climate Change is affected by our politics in the sense that politics can affect humanity’s collective response to this crisis. But, at the end of the day, it is climate indicators, climate feedback mechanisms in our environment, that will determine whether we are making progress or not. Basically, climate change indicators are things like: “ Greenhouse Gas Emissions ,  Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions ,  Atmospheric Concentrations of Greenhouse Gases ,  Climate Forcing ,  U.S. and Global Temperature ,  High and Low Temperatures ,  U.S. ...

Feeling a compulsion to continually acknowledge the fact that human-caused Climate Change is happening? It’s understandable. Our last US election has resurrected the pathetic chimera of climate denial. It’s a tragedy. Our attention to the problem at hand, that our climate is warming quickly, has been hijacked. Now we worry for our latest immigrants. For we are all are immigrants. I’m Famine Irish, myself, and only differ from those misaligned today by the trumped-up Travel Ban but for the vagaries of time. At a recent rally in Rochester against the so-called ban, I felt compelled to read before a gathering of hundreds the entire poem, " The New Colossus ", whose lines "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” everyone knows.   Now we worry for indigenous peoples whose temporary victory at the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), following fire-hosing of our fellow Americans in freezing weather, captured the nation’s and world’s attentio...

Fears that Trump’s anti-environmental harangues would turn out to be reality once he got installed as President have come to pass. His spate of executive orders challenging known science and prudent care of our environment threatens to disrupt decades of national and international efforts to address Climate Change. A national frenzy, whether orchestrated purposely or not, is now in play in the form of the disturbing dazzle of the Donald’ antics, designed to steal away the public’s and the media’s attention. From this point on, one of the unknown unknowns (things we didn’t even know we didn’t know) confounding the planning for Climate Change is now unfolding, a tipping point of sorts that might be called the Trump Effect on Climate Change. The excrement has collided with the rotary oscillator:  Since the inauguration: ·          EPA airbrushes climate webpage as Pruitt nears confirmation  US federal environment agency has quietly removed ...