environment: denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 5: Send In The Clowns
The July 19 Colorodoan (CO) runs an article very properly pointing out that arch-denialist Fred Singer is a buffoon:
Don’t worry, be happy about the changing climate.
And don’t believe newspaper articles like this one – the mainstream media are not to be trusted because reporters have been “brainwashed” to believe the prevailing wisdom of climate science, which suggests climate change is real and caused by people.
Those were the messages Monday evening from Colorado State University emeritus atmospheric science professor William Gray and the “dean” of climate change skeptics, Fred Singer, an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia. Singer and Gray spoke to a sometimes unruly and tense audience in a packed CSU auditorium in attempts to convince them that most climate science is “hokum” and “bunk.”
Fear about climate change, Singer said, is a “psychosis” because global warming is natural and harmless.
Presenting almost no data while being peppered with questions from some of CSU’s other atmospheric scientists and faculty, the pair emphatically denied the climate has warmed significantly in recent decades and said rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have only positive implications for humans.
It’s always good to indulge in a little bit of justified character assassination. Sent July 19:
Fred Singer is a living example of Upton Sinclair’s apothegm, “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his paycheck depends upon his not understanding it.” His denials of oil company funding are Nixonian shadings of the truth; many of the organizations he’s affiliated with rely heavily on the fossil fuel industry for their support. If he examined the evidence for human causes of climate change with the kind of genuine skepticism any good professional scientist employs, he’d be forced to abandon a gratifying and remunerative position. Accorded disproportionate prominence in the media due to his rejection of the worldwide climatological consensus on global warming, Singer’s credibility is summarized neatly in your article’s fifth paragraph. “Presenting almost no data,” is not a phrase appropriate to a credible scientist. Singer’s not a skeptic, but a corporate shill exploiting public confusion and fear for personal gain.
Warren Senders
India music vocalists: 78 rpm discs African music genius
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78 rpm Records of Indian Music: Swahili Song by Sitti Binti Saad
I was looking through stacks of 78s in Chor Bazaar during a Mumbai visit in the late 1990s when this one showed up under my fingers.
Always on the lookout for anomalies, I was delighted to find this double-sided recording of a Swahili song. Turns out the singer is really terrific; a little bit of searching under her name yields quite a lot of information about someone who was quite an important figure in world music in the first half of the twentieth century.
Sheikh Abdullah Amur Suleiman has more, in a charming biography on the Zanzibar facebook page:
With a characteristic and gifted voice, Siti binti Saad rose to a position of national pride as the songstress of her day. She was the first East African woman to have her voice recorded on discs for the purpose of entertaining and promoting the Swahili language and creating a commercial enterprise out of those records.
Those memorable love songs are still in the hearts of many admirers who pass them on to the next generation. Siti, as she was commonly known, sang in Swahili. She sang at the palace, wedding parties and other public functions.
Siti could also sing in Arabic and Hindustani. When the monsoon dhows from Kuwait, Iraq, Oman and Southern Arabia visited here in those days she used to be fully booked with singing appointments to entertain the captains and crews of the dhows.
Elmughani Shahir Sitti Binti Saad (with Chorus):
“Riala Yashami Haisemi Uwongo”
India Indian music music vocalists: 78 rpm discs Quawwali
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78 rpm Records of Indian Music: Ismail Azad Quawal
This disc brings us the third and fourth parts of a lengthier quawwal performance by Ismail Azad Quawal.
I enjoy his fervent delivery and the acrobatic accompaniment.
environment: coastlines erosion oceans scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 4: West Coastin’
The July 18 Monterey Herald (CA) reports on a study of Pacific coastal erosion:
The storms that battered the West Coast during the winter of 2009-10 eroded record chunks of shoreline, and more will likely disappear as the changing climate brings more such powerful storm seasons, scientists warn in a new study.
Pacific waves were 20 percent stronger on average than any year since 1997 and higher-than-usual sea levels drove them further inland, tearing away on average one-third m ore land in California.
The state’s beaches were “eroded to often unprecedented levels,” said Patrick Barnard, a coastal geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who led the research.
“It’s the kind of winter we may experience more frequently” as global temperatures rise, he said.
Nowhere along the West Coast was erosion more pronounced than at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. That winter, the Pacific encroached 184 feet inland, 75 percent more than in a typical season.
Maybe scientists should hold up a big flag when they have something important to say? Sent July 18:
When the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patrick Barnard says, “there’s no indication (of) a light at the end of the tunnel anytime soon, given the current trends that we’re observing,” he’s using language designed for careful and accurate communication. But anyone who understands “science-speak” will recognize the signs: Dr. Barnard is extremely alarmed. While his team’s research on the Pacific coastline’s future in a post-global-warming world has scary enough implications for communities on the ocean’s edge, when you consider that countless regional environments and ecosystems around the planet face similar disturbances, these are frightening findings indeed. Take the changes faced by Ocean Beach and multiply them a hundred thousand times, and you can begin to imagine the disruptions the coming climate chaos will bring. In their precise and unemotional way, the scientists are shouting out a warning: we must act now if we are to mitigate the storms of the coming centuries.
Warren Senders
India Indian music music vocalists: 78 rpm discs bhajan
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78 rpm Records of Indian Music: M.L. Chowdhry and Sunita Devi
This “Shiv Lila Bhajan” in two parts was part of the collection acquired in Udaipur in 2000.
Enjoy.
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility EPA idiots Republicans
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 3: Hey! I’m-a-talkin’ to YOU!
The July 17 Poughkeepsie Journal runs an interview with their area’s Regional EPA director, prefacing it with some pointed words of criticism:
Nevertheless, it is on that second subject, global warming, that the federal Environmental Protection Agency has been far too tepid in its response. Both the agency and federal elected officials still have to find common ground — and viable solutions.
Judith Enck, the EPA regional administrator, defended the agency’s decision not to press forward more forcibly without congressional support, despite various court rulings that would seem to give the EPA more latitude here.
I think I’m going to start writing to the multinationals directly. Yeah, that’ll work. The Poughkeepsie Journal has a 250-word limit, and I didn’t feel like cutting this one down from 195, so it’s a little longer than the default 150. Sent July 17:
It is irrefutable that the EPA should push harder to limit carbon emissions and give more attention to educating the public on the extremely dangerous future that awaits us if global climate change is not controlled. Sadly, it’s also irrefutable that the current political climate is a dreadful one for progress on environmental issues. With an ideologically constricted Republican party chock-full of anti-science zealots who appear to believe that they can create their own reality if they don’t like this one, meaningful legislative initiatives on what is arguably the most pressing issue of our time are entirely out of the question. Yes, the EPA should do its job more zealously, with special attention to aspects of the environment which transcend national boundaries and affect all the world’s people. But the other side of the equation is that the corporate forces controlling our politics must realize that if their customer base were to experience what biologists delicately call an “evolutionary bottleneck,” it would hurt their future profit margins more than a worldwide shift to renewable energy. Let the world’s multinationals figure this out, and we’ll see Republicans publicly embracing wind turbines and solar panels.
Warren Senders
India Indian music music vocalists: 78 rpm discs
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78 rpm Records of Indian Music: Bangri Geets by Sardar Bai
This disc was part of the collection of 78s I acquired in Udaipur in 2000. These songs would appear to be in the Bangri language, which is also known as Haryanvi.
It is possible that this music is specific to the Bangri people, about whom little information is available beyond this:
The 5.7 million Bangri are located mainly in the states of Haryana, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, and Delhi. Their language, Bangaru, is a member of the Indo-Aryan language family. Little is known about their specific lifestyle and culture.
Link
Irritatingly for my atheistic self, the site is that of PrayWay, a “global prayer community” that lists the Bangri among the world’s “unreached” peoples:
* People name: Bangri
* Country: India
* Their language: Bangaru
* Population:
(1990) 5,251,200
(1995) 5,776,500
(2000) 6,309,100
* Largest religion:
Hindu 98.4%
* Christians: 1.6%
* Church members: 92,425
* Scriptures in their own language: None
* Jesus Film in their own language: None
* Christian broadcasts in their own language: None
* Mission agencies working among this people: 2
* Persons who have heard the Gospel: 1,421,000 (25%)
Those evangelized by local Christians: 439,000 (8%)
Those evangelized from the outside: 982,000 (17%)
* Persons who have never heard the Gospel: 4,355,500 (75%)
Fortunately for us, there’s no need to convert these folks; let’s just listen to these two songs.
No information is available about Sardar Bai; there have been various well-known singers with that name in India’s recent history. I’m betting this isn’t one of them.
Saath Meri Men Bayaah Karaade
Aise Devar Ko Na Lod
environment: corporate irresponsibility deforestation forests scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 2: O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum
More on the Forests study, this time from the Christian Science Monitor for July 17:
Want to save the planet? Plant a tree.
Or maybe a lot of them. Or maybe don’t cut down so many.
These are the implications of a new study, which found that the world’s forests play an unexpectedly large role in climate change, vacuuming up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and storing the carbon in wood, according to research published online Thursday by the journal Science.
That, in turn, helps regulate CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere – and keeps the planet from overheating.
Kind of a clunky letter, but I’m having kind of a clunky day, so it fits. Sent Sunday, July 17, as the expected heat wave starts moving into position.
Extreme weather events are coming faster and faster, harder and harder, all over the planet. It looks like our carbon dioxide chickens are coming home to roost, as emissions from the last century’s fossil fuel consumption accumulate in the atmosphere. A runaway greenhouse effect may not yet be totally inevitable, but it’s definitely on the horizon unless all of the world’s nations take serious and concerted action against climate chaos. Our history of slash-and-burn deforestation has devastated millions of acres of carbon sink — in the name of disposable paper products. Humanity’s survival cannot be assumed in an economic system that assigns value to destroying the ecosystems of which we are a part. The discovery that our planet’s forests absorb more CO2 than was previously suspected is good news, but it comes with an important caveat: we must ensure that forest lands are preserved and expanded over the coming years.
Warren Senders
India Indian music music vocalists: 78 rpm discs weirdness
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78 rpm Records of Indian Music: Hindustani Comic Song by Mr. Muradaly & Others
I have no information on “Mr. Muradaly and others.” But as I was pawing through a big stack of 78s in the middle of Chor Bazaar years ago, my eye was caught by this record.
How could I resist a “Hindustani Comic Song”?
“Chalo Jung Kare” translates roughly as, “Come! Let’s go to war,” and indeed the military is clearly being lampooned, what with bugle calls and all. Do I detect some dialect humor?
Enjoy.
environment: Damoclean threat glaciers mountains
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 1: From The Roof Of The World…
One of the world’s most experienced Everest hands, Apa Sherpa, has firsthand testimony about the effects of climate change, reports the July 16th edition of The Hindu:
It was in 1985 that Apa Sherpa, who scaled Mount Everest for the 21st time in May 2011, came face to face with climate change. His entire village Thame was washed away in a massive glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) of the Dig Tsho (Tsho-lake), in the western section of the Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Khumbu Himal, on August 4, 1985.
The veteran mountaineer, who dropped out of school at 12 to work as a porter for expeditions to support his family, told The Hindu that the lake burst at 2 a.m. and he had a narrow escape. Now his worry is another glacial lake in the Everest region, Imja, which is growing bigger. “Imja Khola is a threat to the entire region and I can’t say if it is as safe as is made out to be. We have to do something before it bursts.” Imja, located in the Khumbu region close to the Everest base camp, did not exist in photographs taken in the 1950s, but now has rapidly expanded to 1.012 sq km.
When The Force offers you a good analogy, take it. Sent July 16:
The Sherpa villagers below the burgeoning Imja lake in Mount Everest’s shadow have much to teach the rest of humanity. Of all the world’s peoples, these villagers have contributed not a single iota to the CO2 emissions that have built up in our atmosphere over the past century and now threaten to trigger a runaway greenhouse effect — yet they are the ones who daily look up at a growing lake poised over their heads.
All the Earth’s peoples now face the Sherpas’ Damoclean predicament. If humanity is to endure and prosper, it is time to get to work on controlling our carbon emissions, addressing the genuine threat of climate change. The world’s political and economic leaders appear to care more for profits than people, but it’s only through a global transition to renewable energy that they, and we, will survive the coming centuries of climate chaos.
Warren Senders