Endeesea’s Neighborhood

Hot-Chocolate

We did more house hunting online last night. For fun we looked up modern architecture in Switzerland. Most of them were eco friendly and the designs are out of this world. We're probably staying in New England but the vast spaces gave me some ideas.

We're getting really sick of our neighborhood. The people are rude and neighbors have had 4 break-ins within 6 months. Neighbors who hid keys or left windows unlocked. Either way our street is unbearable. At least one person is starting a crime watch, so that's good.

That's why I'm so wrapped up in moving. We want to keep trespassers off our land but I love stone walls. That means we'd really have to find somewhere with a lot of land. Maybe adjacent to conservation area or a campus. Those places are less likely to get developed but neighbors can still connect to each other.

I'm thinking the Study could be an interior room, like a dark cafe. We found some huge bookshelves online. I also picture tapestries in the Study and a place to watch films. Or even to edit films! Sketches, footage and prose go well together.

Wouldn't it be great to have a sturdy, cozy home base. Stone walls, a nice barn, and simple rooms. Then we could have a moderate amount of belongings but still travel easily. Being an author even part time is sounding better.

I still don't know the name of that interior design style (thank you to MT for creating the name of this post)! I like but I'm sure we'll have fun planning the home ourselves.

Fabrics

Dogwood

So many thanks to my neighbors for the book ideas. Feel free to add more. I'm using my vet tech notes as a reminder of skeletons and the phylogenies of different species.

I read about an artist who used to keep dozens of separate journals. One day she decided to merge all her ideas, plans, sketches and such into one large sketchbook. I imagine my carnivore book this way.

Entries are interesting because you get to hear the author’s thoughts at that moment, unedited. Sometimes those are the most intuitive and interesting. The best books I’ve read have had that spark of raw ideas right as they appear.

I like to sketch spontaneously.  Those kinds of artworks can be the most dynamic. Sitting on  the branch of a shade tree in the forest, among the leaves. Small ground dwellers foraging on the forest floor. Me with my notebook, sketching the leaf litter and hopefully watching my subject.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/03/2760367.htm

Folks,

The Liberal Party has now completely shown itself to be a rabble without a cause, and also totally self-interested. Julie Bishop is a clear example of that. She's doing WA no favours.

Ninja

Okay, so no cookies, but Lavish has a warm, cozy atmosphere to offer you if you're looking for a new message board to join!

Hot-Chocolate

Can I ask a question?

Let's suppose you're in your favorite coffeehouse, or in your lovely candle-lit study (Thanks, GOF). You grab a hot drink and sit down to absorb a good wildlife book. Which one would you find most compelling?

A journal-style book about a researcher's adventure travels in the temperate forests of China and red panda observations

A fun, accessible where the researcher did intensive study on a group of pandas in the mountains of Nepal, including their behavior and biology

A small scale story about a panda sanctuary where the critters are rehabbed and the challenges the species faces

All 3? A combination of different styles? Feel free to add in your thoughts.

Red_panda

DSC00863

Yehaw! Raucous climate change scientists. We love it. I found a few more snippets from the Climategate emails. It sounds like the East Anglia scientists may have been speaking their minds about the mind-numbing stupidity they have to tolerate from ours truly day in and day out.

I have yet to see a complete email that puts the comments in context. Maybe they're guilty as sin! But how can anyone know without the information? Scientists, like the ones in East Anglia, are frustrated because the Conservatives are being so ignorant. Scientists have in the past, readily discussed the shortcomings of global warming theory.

As I said on WT's blog:

The problem is that conservatives are saying "It's over, global warming is a scam" when that's no more true than saying "we know everything about global warming and we're 100 percent right". Neither is true!!

And regarding the petition doubting global warming, that was signed by nearly 32,000 scientists: that petition is a joke. The vast majority of signatories are people with bachelor's degrees who have never published a thing and so far as I can tell are not active scientists. The rest are veterinarians and MDs, who don't take a single class on global warming. (Oh, let me give Fido his vaccine and then I'll go out and collect some ice core samples...)

Global warming is still being researched. Want to know how much is certain and how much has as many holes as swiss cheese? Read the studies. I'm nearly blue in the face from saying this. Saying that more research is needed is not the same as saying the science is a conspiracy. Almost all science is imperfect. It's a matter of degrees and a matter of judgement.

I'd prefer to be discussing O8 and O16 levels, tree ring data, and other fun stuff. Not to mention the dozens of fun science debates we could have about pesticides in cranberry bogs, migratory birds and wind farms, have mentioned the ozone layer....let's move on! Ask quesitons or watch lectures if you're seeking answers.

Opinoins are welcomed.  :)

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/02/coalition-enters-a-policy-free-zone-on-carbon/#comments

Coalition enters a policy-free zone on carbon

So the Liberals have sorted out the leadership, at least for now. Tony Abbott may have only beaten Malcolm Turnbull by a single vote, but that’s as good as a landslide. Plenty of other leaders have won only narrow victories. Billy McMahon, Billy Snedden, Bill Hayden, Mark Latham, Brendan Nelson and Turnbull himself….

Hmmm. Perhaps the less said about that the better.

And for now the moderate-conservative divide has been papered over, with the conservatives in the ascendancy, moderates being told to toe the line or have their preselections threatened (“they owe their careers to the party”, their new leader warned yesterday, unsubtly) and troglodytes such as Bronwyn Bishop and Sophie Mirabella in line for promotion.

That’s two of the three issues that caused this whole disaster.  On the third, things aren’t looking so good.

Putting aside its dog of a CPRS and its determination to use climate change as a political weapon, the government has been dead right to point out  that the coalition has repeatedly delayed settling a position on the CPRS.  As each stage of the debate has unfolded — the Garnaut Review, the Green Paper, the White Paper, the first cave-in to polluters early this year, the introduction of the actual legislation and its inevitable senate committees  — the coalition has put off determining a position, saying it would wait until the next stage, or commission its own review (it’s had two of its own reviews or wait for the legislation to appear), or wait for Copenhagen, or wait for the Americans.

Finally, for exactly one week, they had a position on implementing the policy John Howard took to the last election.  Then, yesterday, they demolished their own position and began calling the very policy they had negotiated with the government and accepted last week a “giant tax” that they would fight tooth and claw.

This confusion is mirrored in Abbott’s own position on climate change. As Turnbull accurately noted, there isn’t a position on climate change and the CPRS Abbott hasn’t held, despite his reputation as a bloke who says what he believes.

Apparently he wasn’t saying what he believes when he called climate change “crap” or claimed that the science “wasn’t settled”. Yesterday he was back to claiming climate change was real and at least partly caused by humans.  He also, crucially, committed the coalition to the same emissions reduction target range as the government — 5-25%.

Anyway, that’s politics, and no one would be able to do anything without a little hypocrisy.

So now Abbott has the same problem that Turnbull and Nelson faced: what will be the coalition’s policy to address climate change? Specifically, how will it reduce Australia’s emissions by at least 5% by 2020, unilaterally? Because that’s what Abbott signed himself up to on his first day in the job.

Turnbull solved the problem. He got the government to agree to an ETS even less effective and even more rewarding to polluters than Labor’s. Now Abbott has to do the same.

He has very few options, and none of them good, and that’s before he even takes it to a party room divided between reactionary denialists, emissions trading sceptics and the 29 who backed the Turnbull-amended CPRS.

A carbon tax is not an option, and Abbott appeared to rule it out this morning. You can’t campaign against a “giant tax” and propose one of your own. The party of the Right can’t campaign for a vast tax while the party of the Left wants a market-based mechanism.

You can’t have another version of the CPRS. Again, it clashes with the coalition campaign against the CPRS if it is proposing a variant of the same thing. And their own, Keatingesque mantra if you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it” would apply equally to the coalition variant.

After that, you’re down to non-economic tools: throwing money at technology, which the government is already doing, except Abbott might be tempted by nuclear power, the most expensive technology of the lot, and the most frightening one to voters. Or regulating industries to compel carbon emission reductions. Again, the party of the Right promising big government spending, or regulation, when that of the Left wants a market-based mechanism.

Or there’s voluntary action, which is now being promoted as some sort of silver bullet, both for households and for agriculture.

If voluntary action was going to do the trick on climate change, we wouldn’t be having climate change. All the tree-planting and switching off lights and biosequestration in the world won’t get us within cooee of 5% reductions by 2020.

And you know what’s worse about the coalition’s position? They’ve signed up to a unilateral 5%, but look like they’re walking away from the mechanism that would have allowed Australia to actually increase its emissions while still notionally meeting that 5% target, by buying foreign permits. Abbott seems to have signed up to a far more draconian target, a real 5% reduction, unleavened by trading credits from PNG and Indonesian forests.

Quite the greenie aren’t we, Mr Abbott.

That’s why more sensible Australian businesses are mortified that the chance of passage of the CPRS has slipped away.

Whatever Frankenstein’s Monster of a policy Abbott and his team craft over the summer break — it needs to be done by the end of January, because the government might call a double dissolution election in March — as Christopher Pyne noted last night, that will need to go through the same trial by fire that Turnbull’s went through. Most or all of the Nationals, the denialists, the ETS sceptics and the moderates will need to be happy with it.

The coalition has spent two years running and hiding from having to take climate change seriously, littering public debate with a string of increasingly implausible excuses while they sought a way to deal with their own internal divisions. Turnbull made them stop running and face up to the challenge. Now that they’ve overturned all his work and shown him the door, they’ve resumed running.

But they can’t run forever. Eventually Abbott will desperately wish more Senators than Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce had crossed the floor and got the government’s CPRS over the line.

Loveis

yay... thanksgiving...

guys i'm so busy with life... art art art... someday there will be freaking updates! someday that is...

candy