Saturday, August 14, 2010

Wildlife of the Okavango - A Photo Diary

by Haole in Hawaii

I recently returned from a photo safari to the Okavango and Linyanti wilderness of northwest Botswana. These photos are a result of that amazing trip.  I offer this diary as a brief respite from the struggles of the day and a reminder that, holy sh*t, it's a leopard! There is still some wilderness left on earth. Not much and it is threatened, but there is a little. A big chunk of it is in Botswana.

072110_0428
Burchell's zebra (Equus burchellii)



continued at Daily Kos...

Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #300 - Hopes and Dreams out of BP's Gulf Catastrophe

by khowell

You are in the current BP disaster ROV, number 300.  Number 299 is here

Please DO NOT Rec this diary, rather REC THE MOTHERSHIP instead. She needs your love to stay afloat.

Please be kind to kossacks with bandwidth issues. Please do not post images or videos. Again, many thanks for this.

PLEASE visit Pam LaPier's diary to find out how you can help the Gulf now and in the future. We don't have to be idle! And thanks to Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier for working on this!

For a description of the mothership/ROV liveblogging process, check out this thread.



continued at Daily Kos...

GULF COAST, NEW DAYS

by Knucklehead

  Lately, I`ve been not so enthused about the progress in the gulf.
I see the ramping up of activism in diaries with multiple posters, that, great unto themselves, the collective impact is much more than the sum of it`s parts.
Here are a few links.

http://www.dailykos.com/... - 295Drill,BP,-DrillBPs-Gulf-Catastrophe

http://www.dailykos.com/...

http://www.dailykos.com/...

OCTOPUSES GARDEN

IRIS BEAUTY flat



continued at Daily Kos...

CNN climate disinformant gets religion on global warming

by DarkSyde

Via Climate Progress, CNN's long time climate change skeptic and purveyor of every wingnut talking point on global warming in the book, Chad Myers, finally admits the truth:

Is it caused by man? Yes. Is it 100% caused by man? No. There are other things involved. We are now in the sun spot cycle. We are now in a very hot sun cycle. there are many other things going on. But, yes, a significant portion of this is caused by greenhouse gases keeping heat on the shore, on the land, in the atmosphere that could have escaped without those greenhouse gases, so, yes, it’s warmer. . ..

No doubt we're now supposed to applaud Myers for ending his long reign of misinformation and energy industry apologetic -- assuming that is what this signals -- and just forgive him. Which might still be possible, but would have been a lot easier if not for the stuff I've emphasized above. And that kind of material is all too representative of the ghost of Myers' past denial. That bold statement is not only wrong, it's not just a common, discredited climate change denier talking point, it is 100% empirically wrong. Below are the sunspot and solar irradiance cycles plotted on the same graph courtesy of NASA.

As you can see, both sunpots and solar irradiance move together and both are just barely coming out of a deep minimum. The sun has been in the coolest part of its cycle, with the least number of sunspots, for the last two years (2010 hasn't finished out yet, but record heat on top of the recent solar minimum is yet another reason to be worried). In meteorology circles, this is high school level stuff. Which means either Myers, who is CNN's purported national weather expert, has a poor understanding of the science in his field, or he intentionally lied on "America's most trusted" news network.



continued at Daily Kos...

Pakistan, & Hugely Unequal Global Climate Change Effects

by Edger

The F Word: Time to Declare Global War on Flooding, Laura Flanders & GritTV, August 13, 2010


More GRITtv



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Xayabouli Xanadu and the damned dams

by ban nock

I’m not much into environmental conservation, it's a battle that is already lost via a few degrees of temperature. The best we've got is a stay of execution by delaying the destruction of those places that due to history, geography, or in this case war and strife, have retained something of thier original selves. Maybe I am a little too much of a cynic, in any case one of those last places is getting wrecked. I better start at the beginning.
 title=
A freighter about to enter the rapids just below Xiengkok. I'd still call this the upper Mekong, on the right is Shan state Burma, a place with all kinds of things going on and very little government. No flat flood plain here.



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Is Climate Crisis About to Topple a Government?

by buhdydharma

Crossposted from Docudharma

And not just any government, but a nuclear armed government. A government that is at the very crux of our "National Security."

From McClatchy

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The humanitarian and economic disaster caused by the worst floods in Pakistan's history could spark political unrest that could destabilize the government, dealing a major blow to the Obama administration's efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism.

The government's shambling response to floods that have affected a third of the country has some analysts saying that President Asif Ali Zardari could be forced from office, possibly by the military, which has ruled Pakistan for more than half its 63-year history.

Other experts caution that the state itself could collapse, as hunger and destitution trigger explosions of popular anger that was already seething over massive unemployment, high fuel prices, widespread power outages, corruption, and a bloody insurgency by extremists allied with al Qaida.



continued at Daily Kos...

Tax the Carbon Perps: Go Green on Their Dimes

by War on Error

Until carbon producers transit from producing profits from carbon, we won't have alternatives.  It's an insane round robin.  A not-so-merry-go-round.

There are $Trillions upon $Trillions of gross revenues left for oil/coal/gas companies to suck out of the earth both on and offshore.  This is why they will never change their ways until forced to do so.

Oil companies have made record profits, more than many countries' GDP.

Let's tax those profits with a

Carbon Conversion Tax (CCT)

The end users like power companies and consumers can't change their ways until other ways are created.  

And other ways can't be created without new sources.  

And new sources won't be up and running fast enough without money.  The oil/coal/gas producers are making huge profits.  As long as the oil/coal/gas companies are raking in their huge profits and keeping them, they won't change.

Therefore, we tax their profits and use this revenue to produce the alternative energies.

It's plain and simple.  It's brilliant.  It's straightforward.   It's easy.   It's at least an idea!



continued at Daily Kos...

BP Catastrophe Liveblog Mothership: 81

by Gulf Watchers

The current ROV DIARY: Daily Kos Gulf Watchers ROV #299 - Still Waiting - BP's Gulf Catastrophe - Lorinda Pike

Rules of the Road

  • We take volunteers for subsequent diaries in the sub diaries or ROV's as we have playfully coined them.
  • Please rec this mothership diary, not the ROVs.
  • Please be kind to fellow kossacks who may have limited bandwidth and refrain from posting images or videos.

PLEASE visit Pam LaPier's diary to find out how you can help the Gulf now and in the future. We don't have to be idle! And thanks to Crashing Vor and Pam LaPier for working on this!



continued at Daily Kos...

The Anthropocene Thermal Maximum

by Stranded Wind

    Birth, life, and death is an endless cycle, both for sentient beings and for phenomena. A human might live a century, an empire seldom makes it for three, and geological ages a hundred times longer stretch back over four billion years. Change is the only constant.

     Due to many interlocking causes and conditions we are now at a massive inflection point. That our empire should fall now to a mix of corruption and resource depletion is surprising only in that we've lasted nearly two and a half centuries with only one serious domestic discontinuity. Humans have faced political, economic, and environmental crisis countless times since our species arose.

     But the exhumation of carbon which we seem powerless to stop will erect not just the headstone for our empire, but perhaps for our entire species along with the biosphere in which humans evolved.

    A new intelligence may arise and progress, as our kind once did, in another fifty or hundred million years. When they dig deep enough, they'll learn of the Anthropocene Thermal Maximum.



continued at Daily Kos...