“He obviously is a divisive individual and a person who acts as a catalyst….” — Besieged by 99 counts of criminal conduct, former President Cobblepot is doing his best to avoid thinking about life in house arrest for his pathological narcissistic tendencies. …

Putting ourselves onto a global 11-percent decline slope, we could be back at 1960 climate change levels by 2035. We needn’t be so harsh. Let’s give ourselves to 2045. — Apparently, President Obama missed the climate briefings given to Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. While he was in office he pursued a “drill baby drill” policy to boost US fossil exports. Earlier this year, his daughter Malia, now 25, came to him asking where he stood on the issue.

“People really love trees already, especially in Stockholm and in Sweden. I don’t think that’s the problem really…. It’s more a problem with civil engineers that are responsible for road construction” — Björn Embrén began working with the green infrastructure in the city of Stockholm in 1976, eventually rising to the position of City Forester managing around 5060 employees. He was plagued by trees, especially older ones, beginning to die along the streets and in the parks, which of course aggravated the…

We’ll not have to tighten our belts anywhere. — Full fossil fuel price reform would reduce global carbon dioxide emissions to an estimated 43 percent below baseline levels in 2030 (in line with keeping global warming to 1.5–2°C) while raising revenues worth 3.6 percent of global GDP and preventing 1.6 million local air pollution deaths per year. — International…

Many of the financial incentives that stripped the forests of Missouri in 1910 are still present in 2010. In 1899, the sawmill at Grandin, Missouri, east of the Current River, consumed 70 acres of woodland a day and produced in excess of 250,000 board feet of lumber, lath, and shingles…

Will planting trees get us out of our climate pickle? Not entirely. But it could increase the world’s natural drawdown of atmospheric carbon by 25%. Most mornings when I get up I check the weather. …

Do offsets offer any way down? — A few thousand years after the glaciers retreated, the world’s soils, mineralized by dust dropped by melting and grinding ice, reached what might be called “peak carbon.” The end of the ice age marked a low ebb in the atmospheric CO2 tide, and gradually, as field grasses and new forests…

If there is a way out of our crisis, it will not be through the door we came in. — In last week’s post, Upending the Climate Hockey Stick, I observed that the UN’s default strategy for dealing with the climate emergency is “trillionization” — leave it to the engineers and industrialists. Give them unlimited money. They will invent greenhouse gas removal machines to save us. But what if they…

As Rossby waves will eventually extend everywhere, all the time, there is nowhere safe, and nowhere to hide. Migration is futile. — In the 1970s, I had a running debate over peak oil and climate change with a friend who worked at the White House Office of Technology Assessment. It was the consensus view of the Carter Administration that there was no such thing as peak oil because of deep, abiogenic methane…