“A hard rain’s gonna fall”
These words came to me from the 55 yr. old (!) The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan after:
- CBS aired an early piece on greenhouse gases (YouTube almost 40 yrs ago)
- US Defense Dept. is the largest oil consumer in the world (Forbes 10 yrs. ago)
- Exxon Mobil knew about climate effects of oil consumption coming on 2 generations (Scientific American 3 yrs. ago)
- current global temperature extremes (Washington Post a fortnight ago) as pictured atop by BBC Newsnight
- little known side of Amazon a larger provider to the US Interior Dept. (The Ring of Fire yesterday)
As I re-oriented my career to where there is demand — see my website announcement — I’ll also shed many of my activities that played into the hands of unsustainable activities such as those cited above.
We used to joke that geologists turning to IT “joined the dark side” and little did we know how true this was.
Did you know that my thesis supervisor wrote in 1989 Geological Society of America keynote address that “erosion from human activities have now exceeded that from natural phenomena”? That presaged what we now call the Anthropocene, the most recent period where human activity dominated natural phenomena!
And while my summer in the Arctic was a cold one (YouTube @ 19s), it portended future changes via, say, the pollution spiraling toward the poles via vortices observed by pilots (old website bottom paragraph) and documented since (Met Office current).
What I’m saying is that while I steered my career as opportunities arose, now has come the time to apply corrective action. Active with Quakers and MoDem — French party aligned with British Lib Dems and Spanish Ciudadanos — made me rethink my life-work-ethics balance.
I will divest myself from current software and web services to focus on Volunteered Geographic Information, and help others build free web maps — the latter isn’t new since I’ve done it 15 yrs. since before my return to England — and I will continue to lead AAPG Visiting Geoscientist Program to help students prepare for the real world.
Aug. 3 update: @PeterGleick pens a stark state-of-play on climate disruption, Saving the Earth… in The Huffington Post , debunking The New York Times apologist piece, you got it, Losing the Earth.
