Skywatch Friday: Sky? What Sky?

This is a quickie because it's that time of the quarter and I've got projects and exams to deal with. But I wanted to share with y'all what the sky looked like on the first full day after the Vernal equinox--only there wasn't much sky to see, because it was still snowing.

Now I know folks up north and in colder regions of the world might snicker a bit at how north Texans respond to this sort of event. Spoilt as we are, however, we expect the peas to be bloomin' by now, and this late, deep (in the end we had 8 inches) snow threw many of us for a loop.

Hope everyone has a good, snow-free weekend. I am definitely ready for Spring!

Spring in the Year of Global Weirding

The winter solstice occurred yesterday around noon, but today marks the first full day of spring.

This morning we awoke to another record snowfall. At 8 am, the snow was six inches deep in the back yard, and it was still falling. Now, at almost 11 am, the sun is beginning to emerge, and what white stuff is blowing around comes from the trees that were weighed down with it only a few hours ago.

Of course, locals are going to use this as evidence that environmentalists are full of crap and global warming is a leftist hoax (after all, it's snowing--so it can't be warming). But then, these guys still haven't been able to fathom the difference between climate and weather. They also seem to have a very abbreviated notion of geological processes--which only makes sense if they're operating under a view that the earth is only six thousand years old.

Periodic changes in the path of the jet stream, the cyclic appearance of El Niño, solar activity, and other meteorological phenomena contribute to what our weather ends up looking like on a local scale over relatively short periods of time. Climate is, of course, a whole nother, highly complex, albeit manifestly human-influenced, process that takes much longer (tens of thousands of years overall)--even though what we're spewing into the atmosphere at the moment will probably begin to affect local weather sooner than we'd like. So no, the three feet of snow that's fallen in my back yard this year does not signal the coming of the next ice age.

As I learned in my Pleistocene geology course thirty years ago, we're probably still in the midst of an interglacial period (scientists refer to it as the Holocene) and may not actually have seen the end of the most recent glacial period. The thirty thousand years or so since humanity started mucking about in Europe (having already made it from Africa to India and Australia) may be just a blip on the screen, and we may well mosey back into another major glaciation a few thousand years from now.

But we do seem to be having impact already--what with the melting tundra and all--so the smugness being felt around these parts will probably be short-lived. As a whole, Americans seem to be far more worried about financial deficits than they are about what kinds of resources will be available to their offspring. So cranky, dusty old crones like me are probably condemned to sit back and wag our fingers, waving copies of Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood under their noses.

Despite all my innate curmudgeonliness (with apologies to Archie, who thinks you have to be a guy to be a genuine curmudgeon), I loved what I saw when I awoke to the white wilderness outside my back door. The bottle fence looked like ice-pops (see opening photo), the carbon sink like a little forest, and various bits of detritus around our distinctly grubby looking yard were all covered and softened and hidden away under piles of pretty white flakes of frozen water. Even the front porch got hit, because the snow came in from the southwest rather than from directly west.

The sun is again hidden away by clouds, but the reflected light from the snow adds a cheery glow around the inside of the house--rather a distinct difference from yesterday's rain and gloom. I'm inspired to get some home-keeping done, do some slow cooking, and grade some projects--all possible during the next few hours because daylight savings time is now in place.

But that's another rant, and the "puppies" want to go out for another romp (note footprints leading into the "forest," above). They've loved this stuff since we first got them (six years ago), and I truly hope that this will be their last chance to enjoy it before next winter. I really do need to get that garden in if I'm going to feed us fresh veg over the next few months--depending, of course, on what comes our way in terms of weirdness over the spring and summer.

Hybrid Driving

Not long after my post about the conversation in response to Derrick Jensen's article in the current issue of Orion Magazine on activism (Is Resistance Futile?), I had to take my nine-year-old Honda Civic into the dealer to get it fixed up enough to pass state inspection. As I waited for the bad news, I started lurking in the showroom, poring over brochures on new Civics and Insight hybrids. When the "counselor" (no lie; that's what she called herself) came in to tell me that they needed to do a $200 smoke test to determine what was wrong with my fuel line, and that it would take a couple of hours, I went outside to enjoy the weather and look around the lot.

After a surprisingly long time, a salesman came out to see what I was interested in, and proceeded to let me test drive the two models I was most interested in: the new Civic hybrid, and the Insight--Honda's answer to Toyota's Prius.

The Civic didn't drive much like mine, it was a bit larger, and considerably clunkier. The Insight, on the other hand, is a dream to drive, and its cockpit is almost identical to what I'm used to in the old Civic. The best part, though, is that this car acts very much like a mobile video game, with pretty lit-up displays (mostly blue and green, but with some red and amber) designed to teach one how get the best fuel economy possible.

By the time the counselor came back to give me the estimate ($2K, including the new timing belt I'd been warned about last year), I was signing papers. So the sales office paid for the smoke test, and I turned over the keys.

They gave me peanuts for the Civic, but sent me home in a loaner until the LX model I'd ordered in "Tango Red Pearl" arrived a couple of days later. Honda had some incentives going, but I didn't need them to convince me that I wanted this car. The EPA estimates on gas mileage run from 40-45 mpg, and the lower emissions alone would help me lessen my carbon footprint substantially--even though I had been getting between 35 and 38 mpg in the old car.

Although I'd been waffling about the need for a new car for several months, two additional components entered the mix when I read Jensen's article, and Sharon Astyk's new book, Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front.

Astyk blogs on The Chatelaine’s Keys and Casaubon's Book about sustainability, peak oil, and community. As a matter of fact, I'm going to recommend to the Orion forum that folks who are looking for advice on how to resist the current state of economic short-sightedness order this book. Astyk practices what she preaches much better than I do, and offers an appendix chock full of practical ways in which we can survive the unrest we've only begun to see reflected in our current economic difficulties.

I haven't really been ignoring peak oil over the last forty years, but it had rather become background noise, grinding on below the din of everyday life. I heard M. King Hubbert speak at Penn back in the '70s (during the first of our many moments of oil hysteria), warning that at some point in the foreseeable future we'd reach the moment at which oil supplies would be half gone. But rather than weaning ourselves from dependence on fossil fuels, over the intervening four decades we've become ever more dependent--not only on our own supplies, but on what we buy from foreign sources.

In the meantime, peak oil concerns have become entwined with a variety of doomsday scenarios and conspiracy theories, and most rational folk seem to have been ignoring the situation--even as our fuel costs roller coaster up and down the economic spectrum. The whole concept is getting harder to ignore, however, and books like Depletion and Abundance provide a sensible, constructive path toward forging communities that might be able to withstand whatever turmoil might ensue.

No longer very good at participating in any community beyond my classrooms, I have little time left over for the kinds of activism that Jensen and Astyk advocate. For as long as I've been writing this blog, I've nattered on and on about my small gestures at lessening my own dependence on various fuels, and my efforts to minimize any bruises I leave on the planet. Although I lack the physical and psychic energy to picket the bad guys or join anything, I have been trying to be a wise consumer, and buying a sensible car seemed like a decent thing to do; I consider it a little bit of an offset for the obscene number of Hummers I see on the highway. This will probably be the last car I ever own, so I thought it would be a prudent investment.

I also think it unwise to underplay the power of making sustainable economic decisions. For example, we've got an inefficient ten-year-old gas furnace that needs to be replaced, so we're looking into a geothermal heat pump. It's a costly change, but could well pay for itself within ten years in energy savings, and it doesn't use oil or gas. Solar panels are another possibility, although the number and location of trees on the property limits their efficacy. Upcoming necessary improvements to the house will all be made with sustainability and low environmental impact as primary considerations.

The fact that the entire state of Texas remains in denial about climate change and other environmental concerns doesn't help. But this particular town, at least, seems to be more and more open to "green" solutions, so it may be that moving to an old area of town full of recycled houses may not have been a bad idea in the end. And now that I can go 450 miles or more on a tank of gas, I won't feel quite so guilty about working thirty miles away from where I live.

Photo credits: I pinched the picture of the Insight from Treehugger; the opening "shot," Exxon Desert Tanker a "satirical image created in Photoshop to illustrate the concept of peak oil," was created by AZRainman and available through Wikimedia Commons and his Flickr Photostream.