More on the JC Panels -- a short piece on the college website

http://unity.edu/unity-focus/no-longer-road-not-taken-solar-power-comeback

How do you know you're living in a dictatorship...

...even after what seemed like a half-way decent election?

When the satirists quit for their own safety.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/world/middleeast/egypt-bassem-youssef-quits-citing-pressure-and-threats-egypts-answer-to-jon-stewart.html?hp

"Every four minutes...

...an American home goes solar."

(As may our own, later this summer, as I finally finish what has been a five-six year super insulation project.)

So said the President last Friday, prefacing today's long-awaited news on the EPA Clean Air Act climate mandate. 

But solar panels are most definitely NOT "pounded into place," Mr. President. They are instead properly, carefully fitted by properly trained workers.

I could even teach you how to do it, if you know which end of a screwdriver is which. Just remember the sage advice of old: Righty-tighty, lefty-loosy.

I'm not going to quibble, though. This is good stuff, and comes fast on the heels of the news about new solar on the White House (brought to you in part by our own Unity College students).

(If you don't believe me, click on the link in the Washington Post article above. It goes straight to the YouTube trailer for A Road Not Taken", which begins in part with Jason Reynolds and Roman Keller taking the panels out of our storage building for transfer to the Carter Center in 2007, as well as Mitch Thomashow's commentary on the same.)

As a student of both history and ecology, I'm often impressed by how things work themselves out in the end. It's never a straight line from A to B. I'm also pleased that our small college, The Little College That Could, played a part.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." (Dr. Martin Luther King.)

Wyoming's mandate for ignorance

How many years has the USA been at the forefront of science and technology, only to come to this?

The pain of models

Here's a piece from Revkin's Dot Earth blog at the NYT with Gavin Schmidt discussing climate models, and how they never really work perfectly but are vital and useful all the same.

This is interesting to me right now because I'm ruminating, as is my general wont during the summer vacation. I use my long hours of manual labor in gardening, animal husbandry, mechanics, construction, and renewable energy fieldwork to regurgitate the semester's highs and lows and think up new ways to teach useful stuff.

And let's face it, for almost all the students I taught models to last semester, in GL4003 Global Change and PS 3003 Sustainable Energy, how many of you were dragged kicking and screaming to the table of college-level, multivariate, dynamic, predictive mathematics?

Nearly all.

It was like pulling teeth! Or more like jumping into a cold pool. Nearly all of you needed one-on-one encouragement before you even cracked open the software.

This is partly because of the unique and own-to-earth nature of the average Unity College student. We are practical people, after all. If my job were primarily to teach practical engine rebuilding or basic construction, I'd get joyful participation our of 95% of my students.

But models are useful too. In fact, without design models or building systems models, there wouldn't be engines or houses to build or rebuild.

It's all in the translation from physical reality to mathematical abstraction. You have to be able to imagine and even visualize the process.

Antarctica, part I

Here's the first of what seems very likely to be a series of posts about the news this week that the West Antarctic ice sheet is on the verge of collapsing. This is one of several tipping points that climate scientists have pointed to over the years and that has been a feature of my classes on climate change, including the previously-required third year "Human Ecology" class.

(The others, of course, are the arctic albedo and arctic methane feedbacks, both of which also seem to be well under way.)

The first connection I want to make is to this editorial here by Eric Rignot at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Rignot, quite sensibly, asks in near-despair "what next?" The time to act is now, he says, and yet rightly implies that climate scientists have no power to do so.

Our politicians, who do have the power, are grievously irresponsible, but the greatest opprobrium is to be reserved for the Koch brothers and their paid denialists.

Ordinary people, kept ignorant by the press and the denialists, have no idea just how much grief is now stored up as a result of these events.

Most of the news is about western places like Miami, which will disappear, but whose residents have resources to cope, the backing of a great nation, and inland, upland territory into which to retreat.

The place I'm most worried about is Bangladesh, a country of millions, most of whom are living on the global poverty line, a third or more of whose territory will disappear beneath the sea, possibly politically destabilizing the entire Indian subcontinent.

It will take a Churchillian act of leadership on the part of some as-yet unidentified politician or group of politicians to produce the action Rignot requires

Will it also take the loss of territory, a Rhineland, an anschluss, a Czechoslvakia, and finally a Poland?

Interns on the job, part II

Here's Arthur at the CT DEP.