Recently in coming crisis Category

Whoa. If you want to see a brilliant illustration of Strauss and Howe’s description of how the generations will line up in the upcoming -- or already-here -- crisis, check out the new movie Lions for Lambs (which I’ve reviewed here). Briefly:

We don’t think about these things being related: global warming and mass transit? the mortgage meltdown and disease? But look:

We had three and a half inches of rain in an hour in New York City very early this morning -- that’s basically a month’s worth of rainfall in sixty minutes. (A warmer atmosphere is a wetter atmosphere, remember.) That much rain falling that fast doesn’t have much of anywhere to go, except down to the lowest level it can find. In NYC, that’s the subway. Just in time for the morning rush, every single subway line was flooded and out of service in Manhattan, where the trains are underground; some sections of some lines in the outer boroughs are elevated, but they can’t run if there’s nowhere for them to go. We’ve had weather-related subway problems before -- most typically with extreme cold and ice -- but I cannot recall another instance in which every subway line was impacted. It was so bad that the city was telling people just to stay home, or at least to delay their morning commute.

And today in world news:

HEILIGENDAMM, Germany (CNN) -- Leaders from the world's eight major industrialized nations "accepted the latest scientific evidence" of the dangers of global warming Thursday...

Well, halle-fuckin’-lujah. Next up on the global agenda: accepting the latest scientific evidence on gravity. But don’t get too excited:

Uncovered at CNNMoney.com:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Dow Jones industrial average squeaked out another record high Friday, making this the longest bull run in 80 years, as investors cheered tame inflation numbers, talk of big mergers and a jobs report that appeared just right.

Hmmm. Eighty years ago was 1927...

Uncovered at Truthdig:

In 2005, the richest 1 percent of Americans held 19 percent of the nation’s income, the largest share since 1929; the poorest 20 percent held only 3.4 percent.

Hmmm. Didn’t something kinda big happen in 1929? Something kinda big or huge or... great? That’s it: the Great Depression.

But that could never happen again, right?

(Technorati tags: stock market, poverty, gap between rich and poor, new great depression)

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue:

In its most detailed portrait of the effects of climate change driven by human activities, the panel predicted widening droughts in southern Europe and the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the American Southwest and Mexico, and flooding that could imperil low-lying islands and the crowded river deltas of southern Asia. It stressed that many of the regions facing the greatest risks were among the world’s poorest.

And it said that while limits on smokestack and tailpipe emissions could lower the long-term risks, vulnerable regions must adjust promptly to shifting weather patterns, climatic and coastal hazards, and rising seas.

Without such adaptations, it said, a rise of 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century could lead to the inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people. But if steady investments are made in seawalls and other coastal protections, vulnerability could be sharply reduced.

But wait, the truth is really so worse:

Science-fiction Science "fact" author Whitley Strieber says we're about to make first contact with aliens. Or not:

It is possible that the visitors are about to show up. I am not saying that this will happen, but only that this is a time when it could happen, and there are some indications that it may be about to happen.

In other news, it is possible that monkeys might fly out my butt in the near future. I'm not saying this is absolutely going to happen, but if it does, I totally called it, and if it doesn't, duh, I said it might not.

It's possible Strieber's prediction is merely a projection of his fear that James "Scotty" Doohan's ashes will fall back to Earth from orbit and bring fiery death from on high.

In other other news, Strieber predicts the end of the world, Mayan style.

So many ways to meet the doom of our civilization...

It hit 60 degrees in New York today, March 2. I guess our one month of winter is over. In December I was thinking about buying a new winter coat, something dressy for when my utilitarian peacoat wasn’t appropriate, and then I figured: Why bother? I’m not gonna need it. And I haven’t. On Christmas Eve I went out to a fairly fancy restaurant with my family, and it was too warm to wear the nice new sweater I’d just bought. That’s not normal for NYC. And then we had a ridiculously warm January, followed by a cold and snowy February, and now March is coming in like a lamb.

Meanwhile, in Alabama:

I saw the film The Astronaut Farmer yesterday -- wonderful, and wonderfully geeky film: see it when it opens next week. It’s about a Texas rancher, played by Billy Bob Thornton, who’s building a rocket in his barn, which isn’t so farfetched: he was an aerospace engineer and astronaut-in-training before he was a rancher, so he knows what he’s doing. And the film me thinking about the Virgin Earth initiative I wrote about yesterday -- I’d posted that just before I ran into the movie, so I guess it was fresh in my mind.

It occurred to me that it is perhaps just as likely that an individual could win the Virgin Earth prize, for coming up with the technology to scrub greenhouse gases from the Earth’s atmosphere. There’s a long American tradition of technological breakthroughs or new products coming from garage scientists -- see: Apple Computer, for one. And we’re certainly NOT seeing innovative thinking coming out of corporate or governmental arenas. As reported on Monday:

Now this is exciting. This is forward-thinking. Al Gore and Richard Branson have teamed up to announce a prize of $25 million for whoever comes up with a viable way to scrub CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. At the initiative’s Web site, Virgin Earth, they liken the contest to the one the British government sponsored in the 18th century to solve the longitude problem, which drove innovation in timekeeping and navigation, and by extension, trade and travel. It’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that solving the longitude changed the world in the 18th century in the same way that kicking global warming in the butt will do in the 21st.

Gas prices aren’t the only thing falling in my neighborhood: we’ve lost more trees and more big branches off trees in the past week or two than in the four and a half years I’ve lived here. I’m talking big, old grandfather trees, the kind that -- even if the city comes and plants new ones, which it probably will -- cannot really be replaced.

Some of it is the result of stupid pruning:

So many beautiful old trees have been cut into a bizarre Y shape to accommodate above-ground wires (phone, electricity, cable) that invariably weakens the tree -- lots of arboreal Y arms fell this summer, and some trees that lost their Y arms eventually die altogether, and end up like this: