Johnathan Franzen published a sobering column in the New Yorker which basically says he doesn’t believe humans can stop climate change.
Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met.
Scientific American published a rebuttal in a blog which basically tells him to STFU.
But I am a scientist, which means I believe in miracles. I live on one. We are improbable life on a perfect planet. No other place in the Universe has nooks or perfect mountaintops or small and beautiful gardens.
Reading it for the first time, I wanted it to be written more as a point-by-point rebuttal. When I re-read it, I realized the author chose to focus on words of hope rather than scientific diarrhea—a welcome shift from the stuff I read every day. Climate scientists know better than any of us what’s probably coming in our future, and it’s not pretty. I’m taking comfort in the fact that she can still be optimistic.
WRI has been in the news this week for various reasons, some of them troubling. One of our board members hosted a fundraiser for Trump last week, and took a lot of heat for it. Another member resigned this week after being linked to the Epstein scandal. While I wouldn’t characterize the state of things as “upheval”, I know there are a lot of concerned employees who are looking for answers, and it forces us to look at our practices and expectations for inviting high-profile figures to advise and guide our organization.
Another excellent article on the growing water crisis popped up in my Flipboard feed, this one from NPR. Go WRI!
I’m proud of everything we do at the World Resources Institute, but yesterday was a banner day for the Water team: a story on water stress was featured as a front-page story on the New York Times. For a relatively small group of people, our reach is long.
This is pretty cool: The New York Times did an interactive piece on food affects climate change, and vice versa. It liberally references two WRI reports we published recently: Shifting Diets For a Sustainable Food Future and Improving Aquaculture.
Here’s your Idiot (the guy on the right) with the CEO of the World Resources Institute (definitely not an idiot) getting his 5-year tenure award. 5 years!
I’m a little rough around the edges this morning; I was out last night with a bunch of work friends saying farewell to a couple of coworkers and didn’t get home until midnight. We walked a few blocks away from the office and sat around a fire pit at a place called the Wundergarten, an outdoor beer garden surrounded by gleaming new highrise buildings in the H street district.
Leaving WRI are two friends who predated me by a year or two; I’m still shocked by the fact that I’ve been at WRI for over five years now. We warmed ourselves around the fire and told stories, and the second beer I had knocked me on my ass: some kind of seasonal winter beer that tasted more like whiskey and which someone told me was around 10% ABV.
I miscalculated the schedule and missed the 9PM train, which meant I had to hang around Union Station until the 10:40, the last one headed north. I picked up a Shake Shack burger and fries and listened to podcasts until it was time to board.
The train to work was almost completely empty this morning, which was kind of spooky. Union Station at rush hour felt like it does at 10PM, right before the last train north leaves the station.
I didn’t think much of George HW Bush when he was President, but it’s amazing to reevaluate him in terms of the latest model. I can’t deny my respect for his service to our country, even if he ran an organization that arguably did more harm than good worldwide. As with all people, he was a complicated, flawed, honorable human being, and I’d like to believe he did more good than harm in his life. Godspeed, sir.
In other news, a new report on food WRI published today has hit most of the major news markets: the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Guardian all carried excellent coverage of the report launch. I’m proud to have had a small hand in its production.
I got a little bummer news at work this week; one of my long-time employees is leaving us at the end of November for a great opportunity elsewhere in D.C. She’s been with us for three and a half years, and while I always am aware that no job lasts forever, I’m sad to see her go. She was nervous about telling me, but I assured her I was happy for her, and I wanted only the best for her and her career. At the same time, I was able to get another of my designers switched over from contractual to open-ended employment after over a year with our organization (long story), so we had an upbeat Friday after I gave her the good news. We’re planning a farewell sendoff/celebratory dinner the week after Thanksgiving, and hopefully she’ll keep in touch after she gets settled in the new gig.
As reported here, the Scout meetup went well. What didn’t meet with success was my visit to the alignment shop to install caster correctors; after waiting across the street at a Starbucks for three hours I walked back over and was told the mechanic tried for two hours to get the spindles off my steering knuckles with no success. Rather than break my truck, he backed off and told me he wasn’t charging me anything, which was solid of him. At the meetup I talked to another friend who had the same work done, and he referred me to a older mechanic in Dundalk who loves Internationals and may be able to help me with the situation. I’d much rather drive to Dundalk and work with a greybeard than a 22-year old tweaker at a 4×4 shop, which is what I was faced with before.
On Saturday evening Jen and I met up with a cancer buddy, a real nice lady who we met in during radiation treatment at Hopkins. She was in for radiation on her larynx and our schedule overlapped for the whole time I was in treatment, so we got to be waiting room buddies. We’ve all connected on Instagram and she’s recovered stronger than I have. We met up at the Guinness brewery and she gave us big hugs and we sat at the bar and caught up. So far we’re both one year clear and we celebrated with some dinner and laughs. It’s inspiring to see other people kick cancer’s ass and keep moving forward.
The shelf project is going well; I’ve got fronts and sides glued and tacked on to the MDF. Now I’m sorting out how to hang the hangers on the wall with the most support possible; what I’ve got are T-shaped brackets with two holes on either side, about 4″ apart. That’s enough to anchor one screw into a wall stud, but the other screw–4″ away–will be going into plaster and lathe. I don’t feel comfortable with that yet. I did buy a cheapo Harbor Freight drill press so that I can drill the holes in the shelves straight and level, but the bracket question still needs to be solved. [Sips beer and thinks…]
Speaking of beer, I tapped my session grapefruit IPA on Sunday evening, and…it’s not bad! The hops are definitely stronger than the real recipe but balanced out with the grapefruit, this isn’t a bad beer at all. And it’s great to have something on tap again.
I shot the WRI board meeting dinner two weeks ago on the roof of a building with a commanding view of Capitol Hill. I thought I’d share some of those shots here.
I’m very proud of this shot and several other in the series; I used a 200mm long lens and shot from across the room to bring the Capitol dome and flag closer to our CEO (in actuality it’s a little under a half mile away from the roof we were on).
Here you can see the actual distance I was talking about above. This flag is 5’x8′ and we bought it specially for this event. It looked great up there.
This is a shot of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who spoke at our dinner, and he was riveting. I wish he was a Maryland senator; I’d vote for him. I used the same technique as above to bring the Capitol closer.
Most of the other shots are people at the event who wouldn’t be interesting to any readers here, but the rest of the photoset is live on Flickr.
This shot is from the New York event I shot back in September. It was set up in a long narrow room with lousy light and little room for movement. Once I had the camera dialed in with color, aperture and shutter speed settings, I set the timer for 10 seconds and held it aloft on my tripod with a 16-35mm wide angle lens.
This shot was also taken with the same lens; in order to get the right angle on both tables and frame things correctly, the camera lens is, in reality, about four inches from the hand in the foreground. Wish I’d moved the coffee cup.