Who on earth are you talking about. If it is me, you are out of your mind. Read the book.

Yes, thanks to all of you. Great questions, a great group.

Thanks for having me. Really enjoyed it!

I dont know the answers to those questions… and i am not sure anybody really has a handle on what the big currents are likely to do, under what conditions. The drivers behind the circulation of the oceans, currents like the Gulf Stream, are not well understood. The patterns are well know, but what controls them is somewhat a mystery.

For what it is worth, my biggest project at home is fire defense for my house. Very impt for all of us to have that defensible space, if we live where there are fuels.

Yeah, none of it is easy, a very hard yoga indeed. I dont know what i will do if/when my country burns. It is a bad time to be a big old tree in the SW.

I devote a chapter to development issues in the Phoenix-Tucson corridor, and one of the starting points is a gated community (one of my favorite oxymorons). I dont know if that qualifies as “planned.”
About Mono, it is not in the book, but is a very interesting story in its own right, as it very slowly refills. The future of that refilling is jeopardized forecasted future years of low snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, but LA Power and Water has made a pretty big commitment to bring it back.

yes, i was blown away by his discovery of atmospheric CO2 waxing and waning with the seasons: a kind of respiration of the planet.
In january i visited the sampling site on mauna loa… current CO2 was 392 ppm. When Keeling started in 1958, it was 315 ppm.

Good question. It’s tricky. Australia, which is one of the places where the southern Hadley cell descends is experiencing big impacts, but one of the things in the s hemisphere’s favor is that it has much more ocean, and therefore more potential moderating effects than the land-heavy north. But still trickier is what kind of non-linear changes might manifest in the oceans: if any of the big currents shift, the cascade of effects will be colossal.

I agree. So many places (all of them, from a certain point of view) are almost heartbreakingly beautiful, and it’s that beauty, and the duty of protecting it, that provides purpose to so much that is worth doing, even as we know that as places change, our hearts will break.
Some say, we should not fight the pain and the breaking: it just leaves our hearts more open.

What i hamhandedly pasted in is the title and abstract of new work by James Hansen of NASA.
In it he says the recent drought in TX, for instance, is the result of climate change. Until now, he has pretty much only said if CC is happening, this is what we’d expect. Now he has the data and statistics to establish causality.

the more you learn about the natural history of the planet, the more you realize what a marvelous and serendipitously Goldilocks place it is: not too hot, not too cold, just right. CC is the big challenge to that: we’re moving outside the range of natural climate variability of the late Holocene, which is the only period human civilization has know. The Anthropocene is upon us. Looks like a rough ride.

point taken. i didnt mean to suggest they’ve put on angel wings, but, in the words of the article, they’ve finally left the 19th century for the 20th. Trouble is the world is in the 21st.

Completely agree.

Speaking of Big Oil a very good article in the current New Yorker explores Exxon-Mobil’s approach to CC. They’ve actually expressed support for a carbon tax. Wont happen so i guess it is safe to do so, but they’ve ceased funding the CC denial shops.

Actually i have a lot more hope for SoCal than Ariz. Just have been both places, and in LA encountered a lot of creativity, energy, and awareness. Meanwhile the scene in Phoenix is deplorable on so many levels. The recession gave urban arizona a last chance to change its ways of using land and water. the chance has been passed up.

But i will not serve! :)

Well, i miswrote in what you quoted: meant to say the FS is today not much more than the Fire Service. I does very little that is proactive.
And as to budgets, the agencies have been cut and cut (from Bush One onward) to such a degree that they are hard pressed to handle day to day routine business.
Western lands have obviously not been a priority of the present administration, although Salazar has done a good job of avoiding collisions that would be costly politically–I think that was his main task, from the point of view of the White House.

Interestingly, very little of the Colo goes to LA itself, but the Colo river aqueduct carries, as i recall, 800,000 acre feet or so to the communities of s Cal, including the other municipalities w/in the LA basin.
LA’s water is older: mostly from the LA Aqueduct (per Chinatown, the film) and the California aqueduct.

Good point!

We’ve got to get more voices out there, challenging the magical thinking of the ideologues.