THE HAMMER OF THOR… AND LIZ AND BARBRA AND GEORGE AND KAMALA
Lately, I’ve returned to my roots in investigative journalism. I’m trying to get to the bottom to a recurrent episode of collective madness where every four years a marauding posse of celebrities, media figures, and supreme court justices go rampaging through the political landscape w...
I hugely enjoyed the movie Gravity. The vistas and effects, particularly in 3-D, are nothing less than stunning. Great survival story. But, there was one thing that bothered me, and it was not a little thing. In the film’s crucial scene, as George Clooney valiantly unhooked himself from Sandra Bullock so that the added drag of his weight didn’t break the thin lines that constituted the only thing that connected them to the crippled space station, I wish I been floating there with them in order to scream at him: “You don’t need to do this! There is no drag in space! You’re weightless you idiot!”
In this scene, they are both tumbling along outside the station as space debris perforates everything around them. The only thing that prevents them from being lost in space is that Sandra Bullock becomes entangled in some lines connected to the station amid the carnage. After the lines hold in the initial shock, and in a prolonged, heart-wrenching scene, the Clooney character calmly says that he’s going to unhook himself from Ms. Bullock otherwise the lines will break. This self-sacrifice might be understandable if they were hanging from a plane 100 miles closer to earth with earth’s thick atmosphere and gravity in play, but, but, but George … if the lines held after the initial shock and you and Sandra are now floating in concert with the remains of the station, there would be no more drag or gravity to deal with. Which makes this climactic scene colossally and comically dunderheaded in a film entitled Gravity, which promises to bring alive the impossibly harsh realities of life in space. Why did he even float away? The space station was not under power. When he unhooked, he should have just hung around with a sheepish look on his face. Am I wrong?
The American Meteorological Society names Fire and Flood its book of the year for 2023, awarding it the Louis J Batton Author's Award.
"Eugene Linden wrote his first story on climate change, for Time magazine, in 1988; it was just the beginning of his investigative work, exploring all ramifications of this impending disaster. Fire and Flood represents his definitive case for the prosecution as to how and why we have arrived at our current dire pass, closing with his argument that the same forces that have confused the public’s mind and slowed the policy response are poised to pivot with astonishing speed, as long-term risks have become present-day realities and the cliff’s edge is now within view.
Starting with the 1980s, Linden tells the story, decade by decade, by looking at four clocks that move at different speeds: the reality of climate change itself; the scientific consensus about it, which always lags reality; public opinion and political will, which lag farther still; and, arguably, most importantly, business and finance. Reality marches on at its own pace, but the public will and even the science are downstream from the money, and Fire and Flood shows how devilishly effective monied climate-change deniers have been at slowing and even reversing the progress of our collective awakening. When a threat means certain but future disaster, but addressing it means losing present-tense profit, capitalism's response has been sadly predictable.
Now, however, the seasons of fire and flood have crossed the threshold into plain view. Linden focuses on the insurance industry as one loud canary in the coal mine: fire and flood zones in Florida and California, among other regions, are now seeing what many call climate redlining. The whole system is teetering on the brink, and the odds of another housing collapse, for starters, are much higher than most people understand. There is a path back from the cliff, but we must pick up the pace. Fire and Flood shows us why, and how." From Catalog Copy
