Anyone who’s read my fiction has probably figured out my perspective on life-support\/environmental issues. I tend not to talk about such stuff here, not because I don’t find it relevant or important, but because it’s not new or cutting edge; the non-self-aggrandizing parts of this ‘crawl serve as a kind of scratch pad for things I find challenging or thought-provoking in some way, and it’s been a while since the science on habitat destruction, species loss, and climate change has done anything but reinforce grim conclusions decades old.<\/p>\n
Today, though, I make an exception because of two items in juxtaposition: first, it turns out that the most pessimistic climate-change models were in fact way too naively cheerful, and that the Arctic icecap is melting three times faster<\/a> than even Cassandra foresaw. And secondly, our ability to monitor such changes is declining thanks to decreasing investment in orbital earth-monitoring programs<\/a>— to the point where satellites are actually becoming “less capable” over time. The technology is devolving<\/span>.<\/p>\n And this is<\/span> a little bit on the new side. Like all the other Children of Brunner, I always knew the place was turning to shit— but I’d at least hoped that technology would let us watch it happen in hi-def.<\/p>\n I keep saying it, but no one believes me: I’m an optimist<\/span>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Anyone who’s read my fiction has probably figured out my perspective on life-support\/environmental issues. I tend not to talk about such stuff here, not because I don’t find it relevant or important, but because it’s not new or cutting edge; the non-self-aggrandizing parts of this ‘crawl serve as a kind of scratch pad for things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-praise-of-biocide","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}