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Nina Berman: “This image is part of a project I’ve been doing on shale-gas drilling and fracking. The picture shows contaminated water from a kitchen faucet in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. The water is discolored and is bubbling methane. It’s undrinkable. Many people in shale-gas country have experienced contaminated drinking water following drilling and fracking operations. This so-called clean energy, billed by energy companies as an environmentally sound solution to heat trapping fossil fuels, is actually very dirty to obtain and transport. I like the purple nail polish and that the cup is plastic. In my mind, these elements speak to the connection between polluting energy and our own lifestyles, which are enabled through petroleum based products.”
Click-through for a slideshow looking at photographers and other visual artists who are challenging viewers to consider the dangers of inaction by capturing the effects of extreme weather and a warming world: http://nyr.kr/UCR7Jh
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2012: Top Ten Signs of a Warming World
Another year, another set of climate records. Here, Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the top ten signs you are living in a warming world, 2012 edition: http://nyr.kr/ZdDsOw
Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum.
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“Not even Superstorm Sandy has been able to grab our collective national attention long enough for anyone to think about taking serious action to combat global warming. ‘We’re going in precisely in the wrong direction,’ Elizabeth Kolbert says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. ‘[The Greenland ice sheet] is now melting at five times the rate it was in the nineteen-nineties. That has pretty significant implications for sea-level rise all over the world.’”
Kolbert joins Robert Stavins, the director of the Environmental Economics Program at Harvard University, and host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the domestic and international politics of climate change. Click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/W55ERX
(Source: newyorker.com / The New Yorker)
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Listen to the podcast of “No More Magical Thinking,” David Remnick’s Comment about the climate-change challenge President Obama faces in his second term.
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No More Magical Thinking
In Comment this week, David Remnick urges President Obama to address climate change in his second term: http://nyr.kr/Z02fmg
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Russ George, who dumped a hundred tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean, triggering a ten-thousand-square-mile plankton bloom, is the world’s first geo-engineering vigilante. Here, Michael Specter calls his action “deplorable” and “premature.”
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"You might have thought that with the Arctic melting, the U.S. in the midst of what will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, and more than sixty per cent of the lower forty-eight states experiencing ‘moderate to exceptional’ drought, at least one of the candidates would feel compelled to speak out about the issue."
— In today’s Daily Comment, Elizabeth Kolbert asks, “Why aren’t the Presidential candidates speaking out on global warming?” http://nyr.kr/QjBKBS -
The Big Heat→
Is this summer’s heat more than just a fluke? In Comment this week, Elizabeth Kolbert argues that this could be the moment when Americans really begin to notice the effects of global warming: http://nyr.kr/LVW6jx
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In this week’s issue, Michael Specter looks at geoengineering and considers the possibility of a technological solution to global warming:
For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale- geoengineering, as the practice is known- has been denounced as hubris. Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research. ”There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,” David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most thoughtful supporters, told me. ”Nonetheless,” he added, “it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.”
There is only one reason to consider deploying a scheme with even a tiny chance of causing such a catastrophe: if the risks of not deploying it were clearly higher.
Click-through to read the rest of “The Climate Fixers,” by Michael Specter.
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Zachary Kanin forecasts the big news stories of 2012 in this week’s Cartoon Issue: http://nyr.kr/qCIh2F
(Source: newyorker.com)
