by Scott Chamberlin | Nov 28, 2018 | Mitigadaptation
We spent much of August at Penn Cove, on Whidbey Island, Washington. This will be remembered as the year a blanket of smoke moved in on August 14 and did not leave. The sun turned into an orange moonish ball, the horizons disappeared.
On August 24, as fires still burned in California, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia, Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote an opinion article in the New York Times: “How Scientists Cracked the Climate Change Case.” By all accounts, such an article is not something that should have been necessary….
by Scott Chamberlin | Nov 19, 2018 | Mitigadaptation
ADAPTATION.
A bad word, a stigma. Still, we ought to try it out. Adaptation. Give it a chance. Adaptation. Pull it on, one limb at a time, four limbs, like new coveralls. A-dap-ta-tion….
It’s a bad word, profane, vile, heretical….
by Scott Chamberlin | Nov 13, 2018 | Mitigadaptation
On Saturday I called them “disturbing, unpretty yellowcaps.”
I get why they are disturbing. Our eyes are accustomed to seeing a gentle blueish white in the highlights off the top of the sea. The yellow color is wrong.
But is it “unpretty”?
If we adapt, will our eyes eventually adjust? Will our children’s children’s midwestern inlaws come to the coast in November for the glittering yellowcap season? …
by Scott Chamberlin | Nov 11, 2018 | Mitigadaptation
This is one of those days of public emergency where nothing’s really stopping you from taking a walk on the beach. Nothing logistical, anyway, as long as you don’t want to drive to Malibu. And as long as you don’t mind breathing air heavy with smoke and ash, and as long as you don’t object to sheet-white skies with oyster-shell highlights, and aren’t turned off by reflections in the water roughly the color of butter, and disturbing, unpretty yellowcaps spotting the surf.
Sometimes when there’s a forest fire nearby, you get an entire day of golden twilight color, and spectacular sunsets thanks to infinite reflections of sunlight off airborne particulate matter.
This is not one of those days. The air contains way too many dead oak trees and scrub bushes to allow beautiful light to glimmer between clouds of smoke.
Don’t look for a silver lining of any kind because there isn’t one.
by Scott Chamberlin | Nov 4, 2018 | Mitigadaptation
The Ivanpah Solar Power Facility is shocking. If you’re heading from Los Angeles to Las Vegas on I-15, the new sustainable energy plant might give you whiplash as you complete your descent of the graceful desert mountain pass that cuts between Clark Mountain and Kokoweef Peak.
The pass is no more than five miles long in both ascent and descent, but its erosion patterns, loose stones, rough scrub, and playful dance of sky and hill make for satisfying desert drama as you drive east. In the days before modern engines, the little pass was enough to overheat radiators finally exhausted by the long Mojave miles. As energy-related surprises go, Ivanpah is far more welcome: as the last stretch of descent gracefully bends toward the left, the plant’s three boilers and thousands of mirrors peek through the hills and then spread out in the distance: three inexplicable circular mirages of inexplicable white light on an otherwise uniform brown desert floor….
Recent Comments