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(This essay is a continuation of my essay “ Climate Change and the Butterfly Effect ”) This brave and comprehensive article from Rochester City Newspaper (see below) demonstrates the complexity of addressing Climate Change now—before things get impossible to solve. The water will win  A very wet spring means that bodies of water across Upstate New York are spilling over their banks. Wetlands and swamps are full. And so is Lake Ontario, which is what the other water would normally drain into. For the home and business owners on Lake Ontario's southern shore, the flooding has been a slow-moving nightmare. Water – pushed some days by high winds – has been clawing into beachfronts and lawns, shifting sand, flooding buildings, closing roads. Docks at marinas are under water. Businesses have been closed. Homeowners have been piling up sandbags, trying to stave off the lake. And many of the lakefront landowners and the elected officials who represent them are furious, blaming the loss of ...

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our teeples, drowned the cocks! You sulphurour and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world! Crack nature's molds, all germens spill at once That make ingrateful man!―  William Shakespeare, King Lear Most people tend to think of Climate Change as a slow and gradual climate disruption occurring sometime in the future. Even if that is true, and scientists have overestimated as to when the most dire consequences of this crisis may transpire, you should still consider what it is we are unleashing on our children. (Actually, most evidence seems to be leaning towards the conclusion that Climate Change is happening far more quickly than scientists predicted .) Anyone who has experienced a major storm must have had at least one moment when they wondered ...

“ And the way that I look at a lot of climate change things is, at a certain point, you have nice, friendly oscillations in the weather cycle, globally. And, at a certain point, the string on your pendulum breaks and things go flying off. Or another way to think of it is, things are pretty steady state, up until the point when you tip the system such that your state slides down .” Dr. Pamela Gay (January 10, 2017, Ep. 435: The Butterfly Effect , Astronomy Cast.)  If we understood Climate Change properly, we would appreciate that the time for emergency measures for protecting our infrastructures is now, if not sooner. The Butterfly Effect relates to Climate Change, resulting from the dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions starting with the industrial revolutions around 200 years ago, and having already led to many local consequences . Temperature increases and ocean acidification have already begun a chain of effects, some perhaps unstoppable. One of the local consequences is...

In between marching at the March for Science on Earth Day and the People’s Climate March on April 29 th in Washington, DC, I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . The museum reminds us of the unimaginable evil that can be unleashed from within ourselves when we fail to keep our lesser angels in check. Much of the journey through the museum described events that led up to the Holocaust and the systematic slaughtering of six million Jews.  Its purpose was not to provide an excuse for this great human failure, but rather to put us on notice of where our future can stray when we don’t get our priorities straight. An excellent description of this kind of ethical problem is pithily examined in an essay by a local ethics expert, Lawrence Torcello, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology: “There can be no greater crime against humanity than the foreseeable, and methodical, destruction of conditions that make human life possible. Hindsight i...

The complacency by too many Americans while their government is gutting science harkens back to those onerous days in the 1850’s when our fragmented country tried tooth and nail to hold on to slavery—despite the evil. Russia (1723) and the British Empire (1808) had abolished slavery. New York State had made slavery illegal in 1827. Yet, at the federal level: “Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave-holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers”( Wikipedia ). Though most people believed that slavery was truly evil by the 1850’s, most of the public still sat on the sidelines until they were forced into the fray with their very lives, the Civil War, where 600,000 people perished. The war was terrible; it wasn’t inevitable; it could have been prevented had it not been part of our compromised Constitution. We could have given into our better angels. But we didn’t. The Three-Fifths Compromise is...

( This is an update of my 2008 article: Not So Easy To Be Green .) It should be easy being green. That is to say, it should be easy to live sustainably. It should be easy to work and play and move from place to place and keep ourselves warm (or cool) and eat and breathe and allow our children and those in the future to do the same without crashing our life support system. But unless you are living in Ashton Hayes, England, “a well knit community of about 1000 people that is aiming to become England's first carbon neutral community” 1 , you’re probably going to find being green tough.  Fossil fuels, which Trump is trying to resuscitate and reinvigorate, are so ensnarled into our way of life that even the best of efforts to go green are still going to have a significant carbon footprint. If you travel, what you drive is either power by fossil fuels or made with them. Even if you walk, that involves fossil fuels because sidewalks are made with machinery made from burning fossil fuels....

One of the problems in conducting risky experiments are the ethical problems highlighted by the infamous USPHS Syphilis Study. It was called the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" and was conducted between 1932 and 1947. When the study of syphilis in poor black sharecroppers began, there was no known cure for syphilis. But “When penicillin became the standard treatment for the disease in 1947 the medicine was withheld as a part of the treatment for both the experimental group and control group”: “While the panel concluded that the men participated in the study freely, agreeing to the examinations and treatments, there was evidence that scientific research protocol routinely applied to human subjects was either ignored or deeply flawed to ensure the safety and well-being of the men involved. Specifically, the men were never told about or offered the research procedure called informed consent. Researchers had not informed the men of the actual name of the ...