The first episode is The Frozen Heart which you can rent for $2.99. This episode gives us an overview of what we are learning about rivers cutting through glaciers; changes in the shape and structure of snow flakes and how it affects albedo (a measure of the reflective capacity of snow and ice at the poles). If you watch only this one episode, you will come away with a basic knowledge of measures scientists are making and what their measures mean.
Anyone living near a coastal region, especially in the northern hemisphere, will want to know the predictions in sea level rise by the end of the century. It is motivating to do all we can now to limit warming.
A surprise for me is the increased heating by absorption of sunlight by small fossil fuel particles from combustion. Yes, they circulate around the planet and fall out over the poles, too. Where these small dark particles fall on snow and ice, melting rates increase disproportionately.
It is better to be informed than to ignore what we are learning in multiple ways by scientists and research groups across the planet.
Other sources of data about polar ice measures and predictions:
What If We Get It Right? “Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, writer, and teacher working to help create the best possible climate future. She is co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for the future of coastal cities, and is the Roux Distinguished Scholar at Bowdoin College. Ayana authored The New York Times bestseller What If We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, work that is carried on with her newsletter and podcast of the same name.”
A Land Ethic®. expands the definition of “community” to include not only humans, but all of the other parts of the Earth, as well: soils, waters, plants, and animals – “the land”. In a Land Ethic®, the relationships between people and land are intertwined; care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. Thus, a Land Ethic® is a moral code of conduct that stems from these interconnected caring relationships. from The Land Ethic by Aldo Leopold.
Reports of failed grain crops and rising costs are more common in this time of climate change. Further, war has destabilized transport of grain for export by as much as half as seen in Ukraine’s struggle to transport wheat to worldwide markets due to destruction of ports and ships.
Virginia Governor Declares Emergency to Help Farmers.
The Virginia Mercury published an article on 9/16/2006 about Governor Spanberger declaring a state of emergency as drought has reduced the ability of farmers to access enough hay for their cattle.
Although drought conditions have improved in some parts of the state since earlier this year, some regions have experienced losses of up to 70% losses in hay yields. Southern Virginia along the North Carolina border remains under emergency drought conditions, according to the Department of Environmental Quality. ~ Shannon Heckt, VA Mercury reporter.
US Wheat Farmers Struggle in Drought
The Guardian recently published an article about the rising costs for wheat farmers in the U.S. and the worldwide challenges to provide sufficient grains of all kinds to meet the nutritional needs of the global community. See the link below to a comprehensive view into a growing food security problem.
The article cites rising cost of diesel fuel and fertilizer as two factors that diminish farmers profits from sale of wheat. Farmers may reduce the amount of wheat they plant at a time when the world need for grain production has never been higher. U.S. farmers raise more soy and corn on average because profit is higher. But after the recent tariffs of the Trump administration, the largest purchaser of U.S. soy – China – found other market sources for soy.
The Guardian article also describes the interference of exports of grain from Ukraine after a recent attack on key ports, forecasted to reduce the amount of grain available for markets by as much as half. Further, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported the food price index showed a 2.5% increase. The impacts of drought and political conflicts, the Guardian article reports will have far greater impacts worldwide. The need for all grains worldwide will continue to grow.
The values that Aldo Leopold described in his now widely read essay, The Land Ethic, resonate loudly as all countries and leaders must determine how to feed the world adequately under new and worsening climate and market conditions. What values will underlie our decisions? Leopold provides a roadmap.
Today on Substack, specifically The Contrarians, Jennifer Rubin published this statement about the legacy press obfuscating fascist realities as politics:
The sanewashing of Republicans’ despotic orgy provides insight into how far astray billionaire-owned media has gone in its political coverage. Outrageous, frightful assaults on constitutional law and democratic values are treated as clever tactics. Treating a party that is no longer bound by fidelity to truth, rational discourse, or nonviolent political competition as indistinguishable from a party that adheres to democratic (small “d”) norms casts legacy media as enablers, not independent guardians of democracy and free discourse. ~ The Contrarians, by Jennifer Rubin
This statement was directed at the New York Times reporting on the recent Republican pre-midterm election “convention” over the weekend. I herald Rubin’s eagle eye in a time when discernment is an absolute necessity for citizens to navigate this particular “moment” in American history in the making: we could lose our democratic way of life with this one election.
Further, another person who is clear-eyed and well spoken, Judge Michael Luttig describes what is likely to happen after the Midterm election in January when newly elected representatives are seated (or not) in Congress:
His post was originally published in The New Republic. You can read or listen at this link. I am very grateful to The New Republic for making it possible for everyone to understand the insightful warning from such a respected conservative judge.
Humanity is on track to reach and surpass the 1.5° C planetary heating.
The latest UN Climate Report from the UN Environmental Program reports that the world may exceed the 1.5° C global heating limit on degrees of heating and goal of the UN Climate countries which had projected that that temperature could occur by 2100. It’s likely we will exceed the 1.5° C in the next few years. The UN is declaring an emergency.
Cooling Down Will Not Happen on a Timescale Meaningful to Humans
Global heating will not lessen but continue to rise as long as the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide [CO2] continues to rise. Once the ocean begins to heat up it does not release the heat in any time period meaningful to human beings. What that means is that the world is heating and will not cool down even after we have stopped contributing more CO2 to the atmosphere.
The largest contributors of [CO2] historically are the early industrializing countries with the U.S.A. leading. While today we have reduced our [CO2] contributions according to commitments made as part of the various international agreements, we must continue to dramatically reduce our current contributions to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Efforts around the world to increase the production of clean energy sources are showing outstanding success. China has so much clean energy production they have a problem with how to store the excess. Africa is building out grids with clean energy. Australia has enough clean energy generation that anyone can use energy from the grid at noon for a couple of hours of FREE energy. Even in the USA where the current administration has stopped the momentum for clean energy production while declaring there is no such thing as climate change and increased fossil fuel development, the U.S.A. has continued to build out clean energy infrastructure. The momentum cannot be totally blocked because clean energy is cheaper keeping economic advantages that drive ongoing development. The U.S. public has also continued pressure for cleaner, cheaper power and infrastructure.
Resources for Readers
On Substack
What If We Get It Right? Ayana Elizabeth Johnson – Ayana read the UN Report on Limiting Overshoot of the 1.5° C
The Crucial Years – Bill McKibben updates on election and climate (September 7)
The Weekly Anthropocene – Sam Matey-Coste Interview with Professor Jeremy Ney: Professor Ney and Sam discuss many of America’s climate related challenges with positive gains on development of clean energy updates by Sam
I recommend all three Substack accounts for reliable updates, with Sam keeping track of positive energy developments across the world. I read Sam as I would a hope serum.
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. ~ The Poetry Foundation
My spiritual center, i.e. the physical and psychological tether of my soul on this planet is the ancestral home of my grandparents in Watauga, Tennessee. The Hilltop Farm they inhabited and farmed, and welcomed their children and grandchildren is the place where I felt Mother Earth’s presence as a child. I have written that I’m tethered there, grounded there psychologically and spiritually. For my entire life it hovers in my imagination and pulls me toward it.
America was first an agrarian nation with millions of family farms by the time I was born in 1945. But during my life up to now (81 years and counting) we have lost millions of small family farmers and their lands to industrial scale one crop operations owned by corporations with no human face. With that theft the soil of our geographical home has been robbed of its biological wealth and resilience. Young farmers today – our pioneering youth – face insurmountable barriers to small farm, biodiverse farming. The American Farmland Trust reports that we lose 2,000 acres of farmland every year. Most of these are farms where the farmer ages out. Sons and daughters do not carry on the farming business because its almost impossible to make a living growing wholesome food for Americans in their local communities. The farm is sold. American is sold out for some corporatized replacement that drains the community of its wealth.
Wendell Berry, whose poem has always resonated with me as a fellow guardian of the sacred nature of the Earth. If we cannot learn to live on Earth without ruining it, we are doomed. This is everywhere apparent across the planet.
Why have corporations come to rule over us? Why is capitalism a no-win system? Get a tea or coffee, or a clear glass of that sacred beverage – agua pura – and listen to Wendell Berry discuss America’s un-settling by greed.
I promise you this interview with the late great Kentucky farmer-poet, writer and philosopher – at a Sustainable Agriculture conference – will settle you with his eagle vision of a way forward in an uncertain time.
The things of nature are born and fade away in the rhythm of the seasons. ~ Kenneth Yasuda, from Seeds from a Birch Tree by Clark Strand, p. 33, The Way of Haiku
In the same way as I now feel a subtle shift in the air and light, and walk over a rain of tiny acorns from tall willow oaks, the Americans are witnessing the fall of a dictator and his racist regime. The Trump Administration is applying ever more dehumanization on the public as he feels his own fall from power.
American voters are turning away from the violent and shameful acts of President Trump and the whole of the administration, the Republican led Congress (in lock step with Trump) and the Supreme Court (“courting” Trump’s Executive Privilege). They will all live in infamy in our history.
We have our own Gulag Archipelago across the U.S.A. in detention centers, in hand gloves that deliver extended taser shocks; force feeding detainees on hunger strike in protest of violations of their rights; and in separation of families and children from parents to name only a few violations of human rights. The countries accepting these human beings that America tosses out like trash are participants in our American gulag.
I recall my horror in reading Boris Pasternak’s novel, Dr. Zhivago when I was 16. Sharp in my mind is that Thanksgiving at my grandparents in Tennessee. Even my Grandmother and Grandfather had read it. At the time, my father was a newly retired Air Force pilot. He had been part of the Strategic Air Command which closely monitored Russia in the early 60s. We had returned to Dad’s hometown in the Smoky Mountains where his parents lived in a small hamlet, Watauga. So, at Thanksgiving in 1961, Dad recorded our conversation at the big dinner table with roasted turkey, stuffing and gravy, green beans and pumpkin pie in tow. He had just purchased a Wollensak tape recorder thank goodness, so the sound today is clear as a bell. The discussion included everyone present including my kid sisters whose comments had nothing to do with Russian gulags but which make the tape a family classic. My grandfather’s bass voice resonated as he and my grandmother recalled WWI and WWII and their views on the present day threat of Russian encroachment around the world.
Russia in the 1930 – 50’s penal system – the Gulag Archipelago – was known for torture and as a black hole from which people never returned. Dissidents in particular were sent there which is devastatingly detailed in Dr. Zhivago.
America’s version of the Gulag disappears immigrants and U.S. citizens alike into countries (the archipelago) where their lives are at risk, or where they do not speak the language and have no relatives or friends. These gulags are privately owned and operated by friends of Trump who receive millions of dollars in no-bid contracts.
Our policy is Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Except, in America citizens are making sure they are in sight and on our minds. The laws of America are broken; human rights violations are perpetrated; and the ICE gulag wolves are unconstrained to reap violence and even death in the name of this President and the MAGA Republicans.
In t961, as a young teen, I recall how Pasternak developed an enduring love story set in the 1930 to 50’s Russia while sustaining a sense of dread and loss of freedom. In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined an American political party and President and his cohort of henchmen in the white house, would perpetrate crimes on our own people. Like Hitler, immigrants to this administration are rats and lowlife.
Now, the fall of American integrity, the whole of what we have created together is twirling down to the ground as leaves from a tree in autumn. Our government has become the enemy of the People. .. of Liberty herself.
In just seven decades from my reading of this historic novel, an authoritarian government is in control of the House, the Senate, the President and the Supreme Court. The wolves are devouring the chickens but the roosters have sharp talons. We are in that violent battle now and we do not know how long we must endure the travesties perpetrated on us.
My fervent hope is that a groundswell of voters will coalesce to at least take over the House of Representatives. Already the MAGA forces led by the Orange Menace are brewing up a so-called emergency in our voting system, portraying the opposing parties as Communists and the worst people on Earth. Well, I am one of them, and I assert my will along with millions of Americans that they cannot outlast millions of voters who have known freedom and the rule of law long enough that they will never succumb to such terror.
On Wikipedia, if you search, “The Gulag Archipelago” – a 7 volume summary of an inmate’s journey as an imprisoned dissident in the Russian system of labor camps – there is this quote from the author, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, that sends chills up my spine for how closely it echoes what is happening to immigrants and citizens in America’s detention camps:
Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes….
Boris Pastenak built his novel on The Gulag Archipeligo by tracing Dr. Yuri Zhivago’s life and his love, Lara, during these times. As a young teenager I recall feeling the doom overshadowing this couple’s deep love for each other and the example of their common resistance to the inhumanity of governance under Lenin, another despot who rose on the waves of an ideology that reduced humans to mere fodder.
Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. His novel and poetry was lauded. I recall that in the back of the edition my family purchased, then were many poems by Yuri Zhivago (aka Boris Pasternak), a physician and Russian poet. I memorized many of them and recited them over the years.
Doctor Zhivago opens in the first years of the century, spans the revolution, civil war and terror of the thirties, and ends with an epilogue in the mid-1940s. On a level far deeper than politics and with a strength and purity that must remove all doubts, it persuades us that the yearning for freedom remains indestructible.
Freedom, Nation’s Capitol. Photo by Susan L Feathers, 2013
Climate.us is the nonprofit successor to Climate.gov, delivering climate data and information to promote public climate literacy and to equip people to turn knowledge into meaningful conversations and climate-conscious actions. At a moment when critical climate information was being deleted or distorted, we stepped up to rescue key climate resources—including the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s now-deleted Fifth National Climate Assessment—and to ensure the public has continued easy access to the facts. Climate.us
Here is a link to the Climate Dashboard where you can follow indicators of climate change.
Go Here for the Fifth National Climate Assessment clone off the now defunct official U.S. Government website.
Currently there are three employees blowing out each day to keep building the sites’ resources and turning out easy to understand measures about our changing climate, actions that need to be taken to protect the public. If you can, be sure to leave a donation to help them keep our citizens informed and supported to take actions to preserve home and country.https://www.climate.us/donate
that the world should become so immune to its own losses seemed inconceivable 25 years ago. Now that we have re-learned how remarkably obtuse humankind can be when dazzled by monetary and material gain, we must shine the light all the brighter on the singularity and prescience of Schumacher’s work and vision.
When I first read Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, it was 1981. I was concerned then by food security and exploring why hunger and poverty persist. At that time, I was leading a community effort to raise funding for hunger relief with the goal that at least some of it would be invested in longer term solutions. That project is the Harry Chapin Run Against Hunger, now in its 46th year.
Schumacher called his understanding of sustaining economics as “economics as if people mattered.” He was a British Economist who had identified the most effective size and orientation for production to address the needs of the community where it operates.
He showed in real time examples that the ideal size for a company was no more than 500 employees. A company that size can achieve economic wealth while improving the lives of employees and contributing to the community it impacts.
As time progressed, and I studied to become an environmental educator, his research and understanding about “economics as if people mattered,” I saw these principles at work in nature Herself.
On Earth five principles of sustainability are followed. 1. a limitless, nonpolluting energy source; 2. avoidance of over drafting the carrying capacity of an ecosystem;3. maintenance of biodiversity generation to generation; 4. recycling of waste; and 5. adaptation to change.
We are operating at a deficit.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has released its 2026 report on the state of heating of the Earth and contributing factors. Here is the Press Release.
The Global Annual-to-Decadal Update also takes a look at the observed climate over the past five years and gives regional predictions for temperatures and precipitation over the next five years.
Annual global mean near-surface temperatures during 2026–2030 are predicted to range between 1.3°C and 1.9°C above the 1850-1900 average. It is likely (86% chance) that one year between 2026 and 2030 will surpass 2024 as the warmest year on record, according to the update.
It is very likely (91% chance) that the global mean near-surface temperature will temporarily exceed 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average levels for at least one year between 2026 and 2030. This level was also temporarily exceeded in 2024, when the global average surface temperature was about 1.55 °C above the pre-industrial baseline.
It is likely (75% chance) that the 2026-2030 five-year mean will exceed 1.5°C above the 1850-1900 average. It is considered exceptionally unlikely (less than 1%) that any single year will exceed 2°C above the 1850-1900 average in the next five years.
Everybody and everyone will be impacted due to this global heating mostly from fossil fuel burning which through the industrial age to the tech age has exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth’s ecosystems. We are seriously overdrawn on all measures of sustainable living.
The operational principles of Mother Earth’s body from which we all derive our lives, give us the signs to follow now. While we as yet cannot remove the greenhouse gases already in excess, we can at least stabilize our climate by countries switching as quick as possible away from burning fossil fuels.
Meantime, its all about adaptation. How we live, what we eat, how well we care for our families and others, and having the right kind of leaders in place.
America is in a world of hurt from an ignorant and ideologically driven autocracy forced on its citizens by traitors to our government and people. So here we must work at all levels to adapt. Innovative ideas for reducing our impact on nature (i.e. fresh and ocean water; soil quality; affordability; homes that make their own energy; grid development for clean electrical sources; moratoria on any technology that threatens the well-being of all life on earth; thinking outside the box of conventional thinking…these all can generate exciting new jobs for upcoming generations. Lets get to that.
To be continued …
Photo above from Norfolk Academy in Norfolk, Virginia. All new public schools should install roof top solar and existing schools can install on schools when they replace the roofing. Just put into policy.
The food production and supply systems across our regions, nation, and the world are now interlinked tightly. This is everyone’s issue. Organizations like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation will become even more important in upcoming years as we will all have to make decisions that require careful, thoughtful decision making. Access to the best science and public awareness will be key to whether we collectively chart a course that assures water and food supplies remain robust, free of pathogens, and equitably available to everyone.
Susan Feathers 