I met James Hansen several decades ago, and remember him all the back to  1988 when he first testified in Congress .  This was six years after I had left the U. S. Senate, a time period when global warming was an issue of importance only to a very few scientists.  I am on his mailing list, and this morning received his views on  The Venus Syndrome and Runaway Climate . Paper starts with: Mars, Venus and Earth   are the Goldilocks planets – too cold, too hot, and just right. These planets reveal how a planet’s surface temperature depends on atmospheric gases as well as the planet’s distance from the Sun. The physics is energy balance: a planet sends back to space, as (infrared) heat radiation, the energy in sunlight that it absorbs. Absorbed solar energy depends simply on the Sun’s irradiance, ⁱ   the planet’s distance from the Sun, and the fraction of incident sunlight that the planet absorbs (the remainder being reflected). The surface temperature is then ...

My intention today was to provide the great Russia story.  However, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky have already accomplished this feat, so was inspired at lunch to instead introduce you to the Aleutian Islands.  How was I so influenced?  Let me start by going back to yesterday when Adam Tanner lectured on Russia. Nice talk, but nothing new.  So I thought anything I could add about this country would be prosaic.  Anyway, dinner was at the Polo Grill, a steakhouse. Started with a Caesar Salad, and then into a ribeye steak with baked potato, cream of spinach, etc. I'll skip the steak photo and go into the petit fours.  Saw the dessert menu.  But passed.  Some enticing delectables, but I'm eating too much. Went on the the Riviera Lounge for a Broadway Show spectacle. Then went dancing in Horizons and closed the place down. Which leads to today, lunch and why my topic of the day will focus on the Aleutian Islands. Started with soup and salad, but th...

Yesterday,  Time  magazine said that Elon Musk's  Starship crash was no big deal .  Today:   There's No Way to Make Space Travel Good for Planet Earth Right Now .   SpaceX has bragged about their Falcon 9 rocket:  217 launches, with 61 in 2022 alone. The problem is that the Falcon 9 uses oxygen and fossil fuels, creating black soot injected directly into the stratosphere ( 7.5 miles to 31 miles high ).  This soot lingers for 5 years, absorbing heat, damaging the ozone layer and contributing to climate change. Of course, they are not alone, for there were 180 global rocket launches last year, and this will only get worse. Mind you, the aviation industry contributes 100 times more, but the difference is that airplanes fly only up to 6.6 miles, and the pollutants precipitate out the the atmosphere much more quickly. This is not a fair comparison, for there are so few, but a passenger aboard a rocket is responsible for 100 times more climate-changing ...