OK, bitching and moaning aside, having read the papers, the various news programs I listen to starting in another thirty minutes, what more otherwise? I don't feel like a walk. The particular brand of human I'm feeling at the moment evidently doesn't include fresh air. I did more work on that artandlife page yesterday. Still don't have enough photographs of reasonable quality to post yet but we'll get there. We always do. I seem happy to continue, to look at old pages and start with new. Which is good. I can put up with ten hour nights that lead to funky headed mornings if enough energy remains for other interesting things in the afternoon. Old projects, new projects, doesn't matter much if they “keep me amused”. Or is that “oblivious to the world”?

Later. Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences: "The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland."

This from a recently published study of carbon dioxide bubbles trapped in ancient Antarctic ice. I can see where a five to ten degrees increase in temperatures would mean serious change, but at the intellectual level and not, for some reason, at the gut level. A seventy-five to one hundred and twenty foot increase in sea level? That's a little different. I'm not sure I wouldn't be underwater up here on this hill. Under by the end of the century, although other studies are now saying a lot of it will happen by 2050. Well I'm going to be dead long before 2050, albeit not long enough dead maybe before I see changes accelerating in the Arctic and Antarctic and some of the trouble in North Africa and Southeast Asia (severe droughts and severe storms) explode. Unless they invent something soon to lengthen this life instead of cutting it short. They're talking of such, gene splicing-dicing and the like, but for those now in their twenties and teens allowing them, evidently, plenty of opportunity to die of starvation or drown.

Is there a tipping point? I don't mean for climate change, my guess is from reading, we've already passed many of the climate tipping points and what's coming is now unavoidable, but a tipping point in people deciding to do something? I see recent changes in attitude, but I'm not convinced they're enough to turn it around. There's a lot of stuff that can be done, stuff that's been proposed and some that's started, that won't cost much, so why not at least get our feet wet? See what can be done? When you're starting a big project there's usually plenty of steps you can take that don't really cost. I didn't use the phrase “harvest the low lying fruit” because I have difficulty hearing it without wincing. Still, starting, easy or not, most of the business groups (the guys that own the political store) are fighting against it tooth and nail, suggesting economic life will end if we mess with oil or coal.

Folks know this. You're not introducing anyone to anything here.

Yeah, I know. Something I just read set it off. We talk about it around here from time to time over Guinness, everyone pretty much on the same page, but this is the Bay Area and not the outer lying wilderness. People here have sipped the Kool-Aid, they understand the science. The rest of the nation, the rest of the world, I don't know. Europe seems to have figured it out. Asia, S.E. Asia seem to get it. I'm just rambling, you understand. I'm not ready to march in the streets yet for another few, well, weeks? Months? Years?

You're blowing smoke.

I'm ready to go out and take pictures. That counts a lot in a photographer’s world.