ideonexus.com

Today, June 20th at 23:59 (one minute to midnight UTC (18:59 EST)), the sun will shine at its highest northern latitude for the year, appearing directly overhead for anyone standing at latitude 23.44° north, also known as the tropic of Cancer.

Summer Solstice Credit: GI

This is the longest day of the year, and from here on out the days will get shorter until the Winter Solstice. So go outside and enjoy the season. Fall is closer than you think!

Like Thomas Jefferson, I eat a plant-based diet, with occasional meat in small portions. Like most Americans, I have no idea where the food I consume comes from, or how far it had to travel before reaching my dinner plate.

My pickup truck, which gets about 20 MPG. Occasionally On rare occasions, I ride my bicycle to work, but I usually don’t have the time or inclination.

I live alone in a free-standing house. It’s well insulated with energy-efficient windows, but, at around 900 square feet, it’s much more space than I need. Every square foot of space I don’t use eats up electricity in heating and air conditioning.

If every one of the 6.5 Billion people on the planet lived like me, we would need 3.7 Earths to support them all.

3.7 Earth’s to Support a Planet of Ryan Sommas

It takes 16.6 acres of biologically productive land to support my lifestyle. There exists 4.5 acres for each person on our planet.

16.6 Global Acres to Support One Ryan Somma

The average American requires 24 acres, nearly six times our allotment. It takes an immense quantity of resources to support the electricity, running water, roads, infrastructure, and myriad conveniences that go into our first-world lifestyles. There are only 300 million of us living at this 24 acre standard of living, but that’s about to change.

Breakdown of Ryan Somma’s Ecological Footprint

China and India, with their combined 2.5 billion people, are quickly coming into America’s first world standard of living. These countries are now bringing one new coal-fired power plant online every week, further stressing our limited coal and oil resources and contributing to carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere that are already past environmental sustainability.

Aristotle observed, “That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it,” and we see this fact played out all over the world today. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea has shrunk to under half its size in the last 50 years since the Soviets diverted the rivers feeding it for irrigation purposes. The Colorado River now often dries up before it reaches Baja, California due to overuse upstream.

We see this same over-consumption of our shared resources repeated in vanishing biodiversity, overfishing, air, water, and soil pollution, traffic congestion, noise pollution, light pollution, radio frequencies, and excessive advertising. This natural tendency of most lifeforms, not just humans, to exploit resources until they collapse, vanish, or are ruined is referred to as the Tragedy of the Commons.

Earth Lights (Click for Larger version) Credit: NASA

The humanist visionary Buckminster Fuller popularized the term “Spaceship Earth” as a means of characterizing our relationship to our planet: inescapable and the only one we have. If its life support systems fail us, then we fail. Our situation is that simple, but understanding how our actions affect our environment is a process of perpetual learning.

You can find out your ecological footprint at ecofoot.org.

We had a contest in our Information Services Division (ISD) of the Aircraft Repair and Supply Center (ARSC) of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) last year to design a new logo. Here was my submission, which came in second place:

ISD Logo

Last week, exactly one year later, we’ve got t-shirts for the division. The first place logo got the front, and my logo got the back.

ISD Logo on a Shirt

Yay! I’m cool. : )

MTV’s Kurt Loder refers to the Ang Lee’s film as “too thoughtful,” which is a bad thing for reasons I and Roger Ebert can’t understand. There are two kinds of Hulk fans. There are those who enjoy the dramatic conflict between an alienated egghead scientist and his raging psychopathic alter ego, and then there are those who just like to see a big green monster smash things.

Hulk The End

I’m of the former club of fanboys (a miniscule club, I know). My favorite Hulk comics are those with Hard SF themes and speculative storytelling. One of my favorite Hulk comics was a What if..? issue involving the Hulk stranded on a distant planet, leaving Dr. Bruce Banner as his only remaining nemesis. They take turns writing taunts in the dirt to frustrate one another while sabotaging each other’s efforts to live comfortably. Another favorite, titled The End, follows the Hulk as the last human on Earth after a nuclear war, with Dr. Banner begging the monster to let them die.

Leterrier’s 2008 Hulk movie is for the fanboys who need another “explosion of violence” fix. I think there was a plot in there somewhere. It probably had something to do with Dr. Bruce Banner not being happy about turning into the Hulk, and trying to find a cure, but the explosions are what’s important.

There is no CGI powerful enough to make the big green hairless giant look even remotely real, and Leterrier seem oblivious to this fact, opting to place the Hulk in a gritty, real-world setting. Ang Lee recognized the toy-like appearance of his Hulk and crafted a movie style to match its main character. Ang Lee’s Hulk is filled with pastels, scenes cut into comic book panels, and comic book storytelling.

Leterrier’s Hulk (top) Ang Lee’s Hulk (bottom)

Ang Lee’s Hulk doesn’t kill anyone. In fact, Ang Lee’s Hulk goes to great pains not to kill anyone. Even when they are blasting bullets, explosive shells, and missiles at him, Lee’s Hulk retains just enough of the human being inside to restrain himself from annihilating his persecutors, as easy as that would be for him.

Lots and lots of people die because of Louis Leterrier’s Hulk, which raises a serious ethical issue for Edward Norton’s version of Bruce Banner. Doesn’t he have a moral obligation to euthanize himself? Instead of selfishly trying to find a cure, a bullet to the head would solve everyone’s problems (Although this would not work in the comic).

Leterrier’s ending is the more epic on an action-packed special-effects scale, while Ang Lee’s ending is more epic on a mythological scale. The battle between Lee’s Hulk and the elemental force his father has become rages across the sky, earth, and into the dark depths. The battle between Leterrier’s Hulk and Abomination is just a street fight.

Leterrier’s Hulk wins a few brownie points for putting the Environmental Media Association’s Green Seal in its credits, but the fans of his Hulk won’t care. Only Ang Lee’s fans would appreciate such a “thoughtful” gesture.

John Coleman, weatherman for KUSI in San Diego, has an unintentionally hilarious rant posted, Global Warming and the Price of a Gallon of Gas, where he blames Global Warming Theorists for the high cost of oil and what he seems to think is the impending destruction of civilization because of it. Mind you, it’s not Global Warming that’s going to destroy civilization, it’s people believing it that’s going to doom us all.

Coleman wants us to know that he knows what he’s talking about:

I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories.

Got that? This Global Warming stuff is complicated, and Coleman’s a total wonk on this topic what with all that reading and math and stuff that he’s done. He summarizes the AGW theorists’ positions quite nicely:

According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.

Got that? Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore. Al Gore.

This is pretty embarrassing. Coleman claims to have read so much AGW research, but then proves in this paragraph that the only thing he’s read is Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I didn’t read the book myself, but I’m pretty sure it had a lot of pages in it, and those page numbers can get pretty complicated for some people when we’re talking about numbers as big as 10⁴ power, but this doesn’t excuse the silliness of AGW skeptic’s tactic of claiming Al Gore is the end-all-be-all of AGW theory. I don’t recall Al Gore’s name being on any of the scientific papers. I don’t recall Al Gore owning the NASA Earth observation satellites. And Al Gore’s name definitely wasn’t on the IPCC reports.

So take note, whenever an AWG skeptic says “Al Gore,” what they’re telling you is, “I don’t believe in Global Warming because I can’t be bothered to read primary sources.” Then imagine them drooling on themselves and drawing doodles of bunny rabbits.

Carbon Dioxide “is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.” Coleman argues. It’s a byproduct of our respiration; therefore, it doesn’t matter how much of it is in our atmosphere. I would like Coleman to demonstrate his faith in this fact by placing himself in a room filled with nothing but CO₂ for 10 minutes. After he expires, we can discuss why his whole “it’s natural” argument is bogus. Remember: arsenic is natural.

Coleman also trots out the “controversy” surrounding the AGW consensus, citing that tired old Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s 31,000 signatures of “Scientists” who dispute AGW Theory. Although released on May 2008, this is actually the same list released in 1998, which was heavily debunked then and carries no more legitimacy now.

But what does all this have to do with the price of oil?

The battle against fossil fuels has controlled policy in this country for decades. It was the environmentalist’s prime force in blocking any drilling for oil in this country and the blocking the building of any new refineries, as well. So now the shortage they created has sent gasoline prices soaring.

This is important, because it’s possible that there is as much as 3.5 billion barrels of oil underneath the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, 3.5 BILLION. That’s almost enough oil to supply America for a whopping half a year!!! And we evil environmentalists are keeping you from it. Why would we do that? Why would anyone want to deny Americans a few more years of driving our SUVs just so we can have healthy forests, clean beaches, and wildlife???

Dittoheads consider Coleman a credible source on this subject because he tried to talk other people into suing Al Gore (but not himself) and he’s the founder of the Weather Channel in 1983. They always emphasize this fact, Founder of the Weather Channel, never mind the fact he got a
kicked out of the enterprise, when, as he describes it, “The bad guys took it away from me, but they can’t steal the fact that it was my idea and I started it and ran it for the first year.”

In dittohead land, one skeptical meteorolgist is enough to overturn the G8, Brazil’s Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias, France’s Académie des Sciences, Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Russia’s Academy of Sciences, the United State’s National Academy of Sciences, United States of America, the Royal Society of Canada, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, the Science Council of Japan, the Academy of Science of South Africa, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the Academia Mexicana de Ciencias, the Royal Society, United Kingdom, Malaysia’s Academy of Sciences, New Zealands, Academy Council of the Royal Society, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Australian Academy of Sciences, the Woods Hole Research Center, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the National Research Council, Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS), the Federal Climate Change Science Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the UN Project on Climate Variability and Predictability, the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, American Chemical Society, the American Association of State Climatologists, the US Geological Survey (USGS), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), the World Meteorological Organization, Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospherice Sciences, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Australian Meteorological And Oceanographic Society, the Pew Center on Climate Change, and 928 peer reviewed scientific journal papers.

But in dittohead land, it’s the people who don’t believe John Coleman who are acting on faith.

Dancing Shadows

The photo set for this exhibit is a big let down, mostly because the real life display is so dynamic. A still photo doesn’t capture what spinning geometric shapes does to your brain. A photo of a spring that isn’t there has none of the effect of actually trying to reach out and touch it. A photo of a prism, proportional room, or bionic vision display gives none of the uncanny effects these illusions have on our sense of reality when we experience them.

You can view the complete flickr set here, but remember that none of my photosets captures what you would experience visiting these places in real life.