Our Descent Into Madness

Photographer Jill Greenberg’s latest exhibit, End Times, is a collection of pictures of crying toddlers. It’s supposed to show how little kids would feel if they understood the state of the world.

A lot of people are upset about the show (including the people over at my aunt’s blog), because, well, she made babies cry and took pictures of it. And now she’s going to sell them. And that’s not exactly ethical.

I understand why people are offended. I’d never, ever let someone do that to my kid, and I seriously question those parents’ judgement. But, from a political and artistic standpoint, it’s a pretty neat idea. The pictures are shocking and upsetting and they make their point: the incoming generation would (and should) be horrified to know what they’re inheriting (I certainly am).

(Via MomSquawk)

People have been smuggling ape meat, called “bush meat,” from Africa into the US and Europe. Airport officials try to catch smugglers, but say that they’re unable to detect the vast majority, partially because of the shear volume of them. According to Karl Ammann, a bush-meat activist, the meat is primarily sold to “the wives of politicians and policymakers.”

Apparrently it’s a well-known scientific fact that cities produce “heat islands,” which lead to heightened temperatures. This is caused by black roads and dark buildings absorbing (and then radiating) heat from the sun in a way that dirt, vegetation, rivers, bunnies, and other things that might’ve been where cities are, do not.

This just in: bigger cities make bigger “heat islands” than smaller cities. And, in a shocking turn of events, bigger heat islands have a bigger impact on the environment. In fact, the build-up of heat has the potential to greatly increase the severity of summer storms. One scientist predicted that, after another 20 years of urban growth, Houston, TX could be experiencing thunderstorms that produce twice as much rainfall as their storms produce now.

I’m pretty annoyed that we’re only figuring this out now. If we’ve known for a long time that cities make heat and heat makes storms stronger, why is it news that bigger cities = bigger storms?

My parents keep telling me to be happy that there’s finally starting to be real, widespread knowledge and concern about global climate change. Instead, I’m pissed that it’s taken this long.

So this is trivial, but a farmer in Japan recently discovered a tomato that mutated to look like a malformed human face. Check it out.

(Via Boing Boing)

The other night I read The Pornography of Meat by Carol J. Adams and it was time well spent. Carol is a feminist-vegetarian author who, with this book, explains how women and nonhuman animals are lumped together in the same group fairly low down on the ladder of hierarchy and are oppressed by the meat industry in the same way that they’re oppressed by the pornography industry. This just might make it onto our required reading list.

Engineers in England are working on making electricity out of footsteps. Or street vibrations more generally, I guess, from footfalls to passing trains. They hope to have a prototype by December.

I had a nightmare last night about a giant fish. I was at a pond with my cousin and there with lots of pretty little multicolored minnows, except one, which was enormous. We stared at the giant fish in horror. That was the whole dream.

This actually happened, more or less, for residents of Seaside, Oregon last week, when a King-Of-The-Salmon washed up on a nearby shore. It was six feet long. These fish usually live 1600 feet below the surface.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) was on CNN a few days ago, saying that global warming is a hoax and that Al Gore is “full of crap”. He even compared An Inconvenient Truth to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The guy didn’t say anything even remotely correct, of course. For one, he claimed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change involved a single scientist, when, in reality, it, “involved thousands of scientists from over 120 countries.”

What is this about? Is it actual denial? Does he believe what he’s saying? Is it actually possible that there are still people who don’t think global warming is real?

…are invading the Sea of Japan. Their population has grown immensely in the past year partly because of environmental change (global warming) and partly because of the overfishing of species that, if left alone, might be competitors for plankton. Their sting is not lethal. The biggest threat posed by them is to the fishing industry. Apparently they’ve caused lots of damage to fishing nets. Here’s a picture.

California is having a heatwave, too — it’s been over 100 degress for eleven days. Some fifty people and hundreds of cows have died as a result. The cattle deaths are particularly difficult to deal with, because massive blackouts (caused by an increased demand for AC, I think) have shutdown a number of the facilities used to dispose of dead livestock, leaving some farms with “a backlog of rotting carcasses.”