Am listening to Charles Rotenberg of Doris Law Office speaking about changes to the Federal Budget for 2012.
In the foreground left frame, is David Logan. The Logan in Logan Katz. Am also sitting with Scott Pedlar of BDC.
The infornmation is very interesting. It seems that there is a lot of little changes. Apparently not a lot of things to promote jobs, but Research and Development is getting a lot of attention.
Chuck is a great speaker and the free breakfast, as my table unanimouslly agreed, was fantastic.
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It won’t be a pleasant world she lives in. Cities and countries will be locked in an expensive battle with rapidly rising seas; but after spending trillions of dollars, most of the world’s ports will have been abandoned anyway.Up to seventy percent of the planet’s species will be wiped out. Gone. Vanished. Kaput. Songbirds will no longer serenade us. Butterflies will no longer dazzle us. The boreal forests – the largest belt of green in the world – will be gone. Brutal heat waves will be the norm. Off-the-chart hurricanes and storms will be the rule. Deserts will have expanded. Haboobs, giant black blizzards of dust will sweep across vast portions of the US’s high plains and the southwest. The Amazon rainforest will be a shrunken, wizened remnant of a once vast source of life. The once bountiful seas will be acidic crypts in which jellyfish and other primitive forms spread in vast sheets across the surface, covering the rotting hulks of the fish we used to eat. Agricultural productivity will collapse, famine will be widespread. Money for anything other than preventing catastrophe will be scarce.By 2050, as many as a billion climate refugees will roam the Earth, spreading unrest, poverty, disease and misery. By the century’s end? Who knows?As she pieces together this saga, she’ll encounter the usual suspects.The army of paid politicians who carried the water of the fossil fuel plutocrats. A press that, for the most part, failed to cover the most important story in history, and put “balance” above accuracy, context, facts, and reality when they did. Economists, who used bizarre abstractions like discounting the future to make it seem like saving the world wasn’t cost-effective.Environmentalists, who were loath to speak the truth because they didn’t want to be accused of spreading “doom and gloom.” Scientists who mumbled warnings under their breath until it was too late because they thought warnings were somehow unseemly.The IPCC and their infrequent and out-of-date on date-of-issue reports, an organization that,by design, was intended to slow-walk the science and muddle it with misguided neoclassical economic incantations.But the one thing that will stand out as she attempts to figure out how our generation allowed the entire world to sleep walk into Armageddon will be the annual cavalcade of research and headlines saying “XXX is happening far faster than predicted.”XXX could be anything related to global warming: the melting of ice sheets or the speed of sea level rise or the rate of warming or the extinction of species or the shift of seasons or theexpansion of deserts and the advent of climate refugees and the increase in famine, or the frequency and intensity of draughts and storms – you name it, and there is nearly an annual updating of the rate and pace at which climate-related catastrophe stalks us. For example, consider sea level rise. In the 2007 IPCC report, projections called for oceans to increase by about 18 millimeters by the end of the century, mostly from thermal expansion. Papers coming out in 2007 showed this projection to be obsolete before the ink dried on the report. This year, there is growing consensus that the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting much faster than expected, and projections for future sea level increases of 3 meters or more seem to be a plausible forecast – 166 times as great as the IPCC projections made just 5 years ago.Back to our future historian. She may well ask how it was we didn’t just step back, spot this trend, and recalibrate how we forecasted future effects of climate change.Good question. One answer may be found in our DNA. Growing evidence suggesting our brains aren't wired to handle future threats. We may be hardwired to deal with the present proximate, not the future probable.If she’s diligent, she’ll also stumble on the effect of positive feedback mechanisms – what scientists refer to as amplifying feedbacks. I wrote about the granddaddy of all these – methane releases from the Arctic -- in 2004, in the Baltimore Sun, in an article entitled Ticking Time Bomb. A little more than a year later, the feedback had begun, as I outlined in another article, Hotter, Faster, Worser. Fast forward to today. Scientists now believe that a sudden 50Gt methane release from the Arctic is possible – even probable. This would be equivalent to 40 times the amount of all GHGs released in 2009.Again, the phrase faster than we thought rings out.There are at least 12 other major feedbacks which could accelerate global warming beyond even our faster than we thought forecasts. Our intrepid future historian may discover one other disturbing fact explaining our inaction. All our models assumed we’d reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. Even our worst case scenarios estimated peak atmospheric concentrations of about 750 parts per million based on the conviction that we’d act. But we are now on course for over 900 ppm by century’s end, and we are approaching a tipping point in which our actions may not matter.via Common Dreams
John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.
"Would that all the the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!" - Numbers 11.29.
Almighty God, on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit: Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.or thisO God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
“ With all my heart I glorify the Lord!
“The voice of the LORD calls out to the city...Can I approve wicked scales and a bag of false weights in a city whose wealthy are full of violence and whose inhabitants speak falsehood with lying tongues in their mouths (Micah 6.9-12)?” This is so true today of the exploiters in the big metropolises. We have developed economically, but are barbaric in our relationships with each other. Hence there is deep unrest in our times. The oppressed are unhappy because of their misery. The oppressing one-third of humanity are dehumanized in their ill-gotten affluence.
@TGurley81 
@JermichaelF88 
In preparing a blog today, I came across the religious art of Laura James. I really like it. She does both religious and "secular" art. She was born and raised in Brooklyn. She does her religious art in the style of Ethiopian Icons. You may visit her web site here: http://laurajamesart.com/ 
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