Archive for climate

Bad COP

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” — Donella H. Meadows (Or possibly Kurt Vonnegut) Well, what did you expect from a COP held in a fucking Petro State, a COP whose president explicitly denied that science justified a phase-out of fossil fuels, who in […]

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The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC.

They showed us why we were there: the dust zones, the drowned coastlines, the weedy impoverished ecosystems choking to death on centuries of Human effluent. They showed us archival video of the Koch lynchings, which made us feel a little better but didn’t really change anything. —”Hotshot” People have noticed. I got it in Lviv. […]

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Denying Dystopia: The Hope Police in Fact and Fiction

I recently read Terri Favro’s upcoming book on the history and future of robotics, sent to me by a publisher hungry for blurbs. It’s a fun read— I had no trouble obliging them—  but I couldn’t avoid an almost oppressive sense of— well, of optimism hanging over the whole thing. Favro states outright, for example, […]

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Rollover

So, here we are again. Another year. The last one went decently enough, writing-wise at least. “The Colonel” got picked up for reprint both in Dozois’ Best SF 32 and in Allan Kaster’s Top Ten Tales of SF 7. “Collateral” made the ninth iteration of Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the […]

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Geoengineering and the Evils of Conservation

Well, traditional conservation, anyway. The kind where you presume to “manage” a wildlife population by ensuring, year after year, that its population remains stable. The problem is that as any population varies, so too does its behavior. Mortality curves, reproductive rates, vulnerability to pathogens and predators — a hundred other variables — all change with […]

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PS, CS, BS

As in Post Script, Climate Shift, and Bull Shit. I really wasn’t expecting so many responses (getting boinged obviously ramped up the amplitude a bit). There have been hosannas and trolls and yes, some well-taken objections to my last post, both here and around teh tubes. Once again, some of my responses are too long […]

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Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World.

I’m going to make a bit of an exception today. There were other newsworthy items after my heart (Jason Stackhouse — yes, you read that right — sent me an intriguing link on insect intelligence, and who could resist the creation of the first cat-based AI?). But I’ve decided instead to weigh in on this UCR […]

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