[GWSG] Miami report; San Diego target; the better angels; Greenland ice loss rate

[Tilley, Al]

1.  Elizabeth Kolbert's "The Siege of Miami" chronicles the progress of Miami's inundation.  As in Jacksonville, the rising tidal flooding is sometimes dismissed by media and authorities (whether ignorantly or in purposeful misdirection) as lunar, and not everyone understands what is in progress even as drainage is overwhelmed and water supplies falter.  Sea level rise in the Miami area continues at almost an inch a year, ten times the global average.  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of-miami



2.  With a unanimous city council vote, San Diego became the largest US city to legally bind itself to a transition to renewable energy by 2035.  (Reb. Req'd.)  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/science/san-diego-vows-to-move-entirely-to-renewable-energy-in-20-years.html?_r=0



3.  Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (Harvard UP, 2011) documents the decline in personal violence since hunting-gathering days, falling more markedly in the recent past.  George Monbiot wonders if that has been accompanied by an increasing savagery against the general life of the planet, but also finds room to imagine that it could be seen as a sign that we are becoming more ready to acknowledge the harm our actions are causing and to remedy it.  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/15/killing-planet-george-monbiot  In 1995 I argued in Plots of Time: An Inquiry into History, Myth, and Meaning (UP of Florida) that our growing ability to withstand the presence of an other is behind our diminishing violence against children, the emergence of feminism, the near-disappearance of chattel slavery, the rising incidence of democratic government, and such odd developments as the emergence of telepathic ability in the late Eighteenth Century.  I argue that we are now torn by a struggle between a consciousness able to embrace the future of the planet and our reactionary (and self-protective) retreat into fear of the other, with the earth in the balance, as Al Gore observed.  Isis, both in its murderous hostility toward the other, Islamic or not, is a good example of the reactionary dynamic, as is our fearful generalization to all Muslims of the threat Isis poses.  The recent Republican rhetorical stance of scolding any attention to climate as attention we should be paying to jihadist terrorism may attempt to feed on the battle between our interest in the ecological other and our need to protect ourselves against the destabilizing threat of the presence of the other.  http://smile.amazon.com/Plots-Time-Inquiry-History-Meaning/dp/0813013577/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1450267506&sr=1-1&keywords=plots+of+time+allen+tilley



4.  New estimates of the ice loss rate in Greenland document that the loss in 2003-10 was double the 2oth century average.  The acceleration is expected to continue, though climate action could have an effect.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/12/16/greenland-has-lost-a-staggering-amount-of-ice-and-its-only-getting-worse/  ?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.unf.edu/pipermail/gwsg/attachments/20151217/26063c91/attachment.html