If it walks like global warming and it quacks like global warming...

Over the weekend, track on the DC Metro's green line kinked causing a derailment, a plane sank into the melted tarmac at Washington National Airport, and east-bound lanes of US 50 east of DC buckled, closing the highway.

Foreshadowing a Tea Party Future

I'm approaching 3 days with no electricity, which isn't such a big deal (some people also lost water--bigger deal), but it does get one thinking. It's hard to deny that the future holds more of these longish-term outages than we are used to:

1. The US is not maintaining current infrastructure: electricity, water, transit, sewer, etc.
2. The US is moving much more slowly than, say, Germany, on modernizing the electrical grid.
3. The fossil fuel industry lobby has a strong enough sway on politicians and Fox "News," especially now that there is no limit in this country to how much a corporation can give to a political cause, that a significant portion of the US public still hasn't figured out that global warming is happening and that we are largely to blame. This follows the patterns of the tobacco lobby, the evolution debate, and the Copernican revolution.  Powerful forces repeatedly oppose science and the public interest.

So, as the infrastructure continues to decay and the weather becomes more harsh, more of us will be spending more time with fewer utilities. Couple this with the growing wealth of the very rich and the shrinking middle class, and the US appears to face serious challenges.

Okay, I Might Turn the AC On

Atmospheric CO2

In my lifetime the atmospheric CO₂ concentration has risen about 24%. Of course the fossil fuel industry and their lackeys still want you to believe that this has nothing to do with global warming. See http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/