There is going to be a legacy to the present times that our children will have to bear, and I’m not just talking about the many new debts that the Bush administration is leaving them to pay.  There is a good chance that our children, when traveling or doing business abroad, will be treated like pariahs.  They will be blamed for the way the boomer generation ignored our pollution and turned our backs on developing countries in their time of need.  Others will point out that we did it all knowingly, that we knew exactly what we were doing when we decided to turn our backs on them.

Thanks to our weakening of the mileage standards, the miles per gallon declined for 25 years – and there are now twice as many cars on the road because of inadequate investment in public transport.  

Because we elected to burn coal and oil for electricity rather than build safer nuclear power plants, we have fueled greenhouse warming, leading to exactly the climate change that our own scientists warned us about, starting in 1956.  

Back in 1968, when I first heard a talk about global warming while visiting the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, almost everyone thought that serious problems were several centuries in the future. That's because no one realized how ravenous the world's appetite for coal and oil would become during a mere 40 years. They also thought that problems would develop slowly. Wrong again.

I tuned into abrupt climate change about 1984, when the Greenland ice cores showed big jumps in temperature and snowfall, stepping up and down in a mere decade but lasting centuries. I worried about global warming setting off another flip but I still didn't revise my notions about a slow time scale for the present greenhouse warming.

Greenland changed my mind. About 2004, the speedup of the Greenland glaciers made a lot of climate scientists revise their notions about how fast things were changing. When the summer earthquakes associated with glacial movement doubled and then redoubled in a mere ten years, it made me feel as if I was standing on shaky ground, that bigger things could happen at any time.

From my Dot Earth posting:

A stalled-elevator speech is too improbable, but opportunities for a one-minute speech happen every day so that you can get in practice for a 40-story ride with someone influential:
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"Wouldn’t mind the bad weather so much except [time this for elevator liftoff] for that sinking feeling that the climate is shifting fast.

We’ve already had 50 years of more and more wildfires, and on every continent. Same thing for major floods. Probably windstorm damage as well. That’s climate change, not just bad weather moving around.

And it looks as if permanent drought is going to make the poor Mediterranean into a dust bowl. Same thing for Perth, Cape Town, and southern California. The tropics are expanding, just as the earliest climate models said they would.

Oil barons really know how to dig holes in the ground. And they need a better place to put their money than trying to confuse the public about how serious global fever has become. I think they are missing a old-fashioned business opportunity, and a giant one at that.

Drilling wells is exactly what deep geothermal energy is all about: drill down 5 km, pressure-fracture the rock down there, then drill another well into the fracture zone.

At that, they are the experts. The other use of this technique, invented at Los Alamos in 1972, is what the oil barons ought to be embracing: Aim for a deep rock layer (say, granite) that is dry but hot. Push water down one well, harvest the steam up the other. Then run an old-fashioned steam turbine to generate electricity for the plug-in hybrids.

Works anywhere on earth, though some places will require fewer or shallower wells. Hot Fractured Rock goes under various names such as heat mining; it's nothing like the traditional geothermal plants situated at hot springs.

I recently stood next to an electrical generator, big enough to power a city the size of Seattle (about 1,000 megawatts, known as a gigawatt). It was surprisingly small, no larger than a classroom with a tall ceiling.

      The generator’s spinning shaft could be seen where it connected to the steam turbine, next in line. And backing it up were three more turbines, helping to keep that long shaft spinning at 1,800 revolutions every minute.

      The generator doesn’t spin freely because every electrical light and appliance in that gigawatt-sized city is resisting it. It takes a lot of push from the four steam turbines to keep it up to speed. Some power plants create the steam in a boiler heated by burning coal, others by using nuclear fission of uranium-235 to generate the requisite heat. The cleanest method of all is harvesting steam from water sprayed on hot granite a few miles [5 km] underground.

All sensible species avoid living on the edge. But as the world’s temperature goes up a few degrees in the course of the present century, many will be pushed over.

We humans, if I am to judge from the thermostat settings, prefer room temperatures up in the mid-70s. All species have an environmental temperature that they prefer–but it is always less than the optimal temperature for making a living and raising offspring. Place them somewhere where the temperature is their optimum and they will start looking around for a cooler place.

Why is "cool it" so important?

My father ran a medium-sized insurance company in Kansas City in my youth and, when we were driving around town, he would point out accidents waiting to happen—say, leaving one’s bicycle sprawled across a path for someone to trip over in the dark. A more subtle form of foresight is playing the percentages—and some improving percentages lead to my suggestion, "Don’t Sleep Alone!"

Young adults mostly die, or become permanently disabled, from accidents. Later in life, heart attacks, cancer, and stroke become more common than accidents. Cancers are insidious but the three others strike without warning. They often require fast treatment to prevent permanent disability or death. How fast is fast?

This aphorism by Yogi Berra, the Baseball Hall of Fame philosopher, used to be a funny example of a tangled arrow of time. But now it means that, thanks to global warming and ocean acidification, our kids and grandkids cannot have the kind of future that we had; they can count on a future of high risk, both directly from climate change and, perhaaps, from a regional collapse of civilization.

People take sensible precautions when the risk is high. Ask a roomful of people if they have fire insurance. Almost all will raise a hand. Ask how many have had a fire in the last ten years, and almost none will respond. Yet people pay for insurance because, should a fire happen, they could lose everything—and still have to pay off the mortgage.

But uncertainty is another matter. Those with money to loan will worry about ever getting it back, and so loan rates will soar.

The 1955 Spooklight Expedition was over a long November weekend; no adults, just 16-year-old guys out to solve a mystery.  This 1997 Associated Press story explains the continuing attraction of the place:

HORNET, Mo. (AP) – On those moonless Missouri nights when it gets darker than dark – darker, some would say, than the inside of a cow – things can get pretty spooky along a rugged stretch of road. That’s when the Spooklight is likely to make its appearance.    On some nights it might rise slowly out of nowhere to illuminate a broad swatch of farmland.  On others it might simply waltz up East Highway 50 from Oklahoma, dancing across the gravel road that doubles as the state line.

   Or it could just run straight at you, vanishing at the last second, then reappearing a heartbeat later, as it sneaks up from behind to levitate around your shoulders.

  Whatever it is, just about everyone along this stretch of rolling hills and farms has a Spooklight story to tell.

Which phrase shall we saddle him with?

• If he were a CEO, he'd have been fired by now.

• If he were a coach, he'd have been fired by now.

• Pious Phrases may conceal Incompetence.

• Claiming "hard work" won't get Bush a passing grade.

• Patriots Need to Dump Bush

• If you believe Bush, then I've got a bridge that I'd like to sell you.