Yorke with environmentalist Tony Juniper at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (via Dead Air Space).

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke somehow got ahold of a press pass yesterday and has been filing a series of increasingly vitriolic dispatches from the UN’s Climate Change Conference now playing out in Copenhagen with all the expected inertia.  You can check ‘em out on the Radiohead band blog, Dead Air Space, but here’s a taste of Yorke’s totally valid indignation:

...there is a lot of brinksmanship, the americans offering money seemed.  but no-one was talking 40 percent cuts by 2020.  and the negotiations had an obvious G8 vibe about them.  the west dictating terms and bizarrely assuming that the science could be bartered.. !!! arguing about who cuts what??? that somehow the amount we have to cut our emissions is negotiable??  what a crock of shit.

Yorke also appeared on The Stupid Show (below), a web-based series tied in to the climate change doc, The Age of Stupid.

 
(via Pitchfork)

 
Top 5 lies told about Meat Tube:

Meat Tube is full of cardboard.
TRUTH: Meat Tube?Ǭ

 
If a picture paints a thousand words, then this time-lapse video can represent an entire book’s worth ... a book by Al Gore, that is. A new multiyear study from the University of Colorado illustrates how a large swath of the Alaskan coast is eroding at the alarming rate of 45 feet per year. Three factors contribute to the loss: warmer water, melting permafrost and lashing waves. The coastline generally consists of frozen silt, which once it starts going, really doesn’t stop.

Jaymi Heimbuch writes on Treehugger:

With less ice cover during the summers to protect the shore from the ocean, and warmer ocean waters almost guaranteed, the erosion seems unstoppable. In fact, the scientists working on the study say as much. There is little evidence that this erosion has an end point. As the shoreline is made up of blocks of permafrost, the conditions basically ensure that large chunks are taken off at a time during stormy weather.

“Once one of these blocks topples, the process continues on to the next block,” Anderson said.

Deny this, climate change skeptics!

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
Never mind its off-putting appearance, what with its Cthulhu like tentacles and weird lil’ miniature celery tops (not too nice to eat those), the celery root or as the French know it, celeriac, is a multi-faceted delight once you get to know it. Chop all the nasty bits off (it’s easier than you would think) then dice into cubes and basically treat it as you would a potato, turnip or any other root vegetable. Roast in the oven, saute with garlic and olive oil, puree into soup, eat raw in a salad, you can’t go wrong. What you taste is the essence of celery-ness but with heavier presence and substance than your standard stalk variety. It’s in season now until spring, so harass your grocer !
 

 

 
African Giant Pouched Rats are being trained to detect unexploded landmines in Tanzania. Socyberty says:

The idea occurred to Weegens as he realized that rats were both easy to train and had an excellent sense of smell. Combining these two would, he considered, provide a cheap way to detect unexploded mines and ?

Jamais Cascio discusses the possibility of states getting into a Cold War-like situation over who can adapt to global warming fastest. Eerily plausible. And I don’t think the United States would be anywhere near the top of the pile.

What happens if global efforts to set and abide by strong carbon emissions cuts fail?

The standard answer to a question like this is that “we all suffer.” While that’s probably true, it misses the point—we may all suffer, but we don’t all suffer equally. Some nations will be hit harder by storms or droughts than others; some nations will have the resources and technologies to adapt better than others. And therein lies the potential for what may end up as a nasty tool of international competition.

There is, I believe, a non-zero chance that an extended period of climate instability could induce a state that believes itself to be better able to adapt to global warming to slow its efforts to decarbonize in order to gain a lead over its more vulnerable rivals.

(Open the Future: A Cold War Over Warming)

(Check out my interview with Jamais Cascio on the future of green business here.)

California just got something right?

As the Copenhagen Talks begin, a massive problem rears its head: The Himalayas, one of the world’s primary sources of fresh water (as well as spiritual weirdness), are under threat from global warming. The Himalayan glaciers that store the world’s waters are melting. As if China’s Three Gorges Dam project wasn’t enough, now this?

Way above us in the Himalayan cloud are jagged, snowbound peaks ?

Mary Hagedorn is coral’s guardian angel. She’s a Smithsonian scientist heading up an effort to cryopreserve coral reef genetic data, so that if reefs are ever wiped out (and they look to be headed that way quick), we’ll be able to regrow them. Reefs are quite literally the lungs of the planet; crucial for filtering the air that we breathe and keeping the oceans stocked with life. Without them we would be done for. Yet, astoundingly, this woman is running her operation on personal credit card debt because the Smithsonian can’t properly fund her.

Check out this website I wrote to help raise money for her. These are the kind of people who change the world, and it’s those tiny PayPal donations that are what keep them going, for all of us.

(Help Mary Save Coral)

 
You gotta leave it to a Druid to really give a f*ck about nature. Archdruid John Michael Greer has a go at our culture’s standards on measuring productivity. Reported by GOOD magazine below:

The author, blogger, and druid (no joke, he’s a real druid) John Michael Greer has a piece in Energy Bulletin explaining why our normal way of thinking about economic “productivity” is flawed. Greer suggests that we look at “energy productivity” instead:

In an age that will increasingly be constrained by energy limits, for example, a more useful measure of productivity might be energy productivity?