Watch that next hurricane, super-heated Mother Nature may be angry

Miami used to be swampland. Could it return?

Disaster is waiting at every turn. As a kid, adults say the bad stuff is all in your head. The monster at the end of the hallway, in the basement or around the next turn in the dark alleyway isn't real.

Those kids grow up and may wish for that innocence back. The real world is far more harsh. Dreams of the high school and college graduate are often dashed when many realize their constant toil will never bring any of them closer.

The emerging threat of ecological disaster renders just about all those previous worries inert. What difference does it make if that dream home or job is out of reach when the ocean's expected to rise and wash out coastal communities and Pacific island nations and tear the world economy apart?

Really.

Goodnight Miami Beach

Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell takes a novel approach to illustrate the situation. In "Goodbye, Miami," he fast-forwards 17 years to 2030 after Hurricane Milo strikes. "Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane's 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city," he says.

Prices for electric cars get more affordable

Nissan Leaf

Way back in the distant past, perhaps as long ago as last year, prices for electric cars appeared so high that they may have been just for rich people.

Or technologically savvy first adopters. Or both.

Strangely, that's no longer the case. Electric car prices have dropped. In the case of the Nissan Leaf, the decline has been precipitous. As in ka-boom. According to the link, the base model is $21,300 with an asterisk that says "net value after federal tax savings."

That federal tax savings could be as much as $7,500, depending on what model is purchased. Still, not bad.

J.Q. Public makes a call

I first heard of this by way of a caller I'll dub Nathan. His was a random inquiry to the front desk at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District where I work as a grants processor. Normally, those I speak with want to know about grants to replace heavy-duty semi-trucks, the bread and butter of the Incentives Department at the Air District in Fresno, Calif.

But Nathan had something else on his mind.

Climate change: Indecision creates an increasingly dismal future

Photo courtesy bloguin.com

Looking into the future is a universal concept. While ancient man stared at the heavens for clues on what the seasons would bring, contemporary corporate man stares at the electronic equivalent of financial ticker tape, trying to discern future financial trends.

No matter what the era, those who picked right usually reaped some reward.

But from a climate scientist's perspective, every scenario looks pretty grim. Climate change is coming. It's just a matter of determining how dramatic it will be. Choosing the level of environmental impact due to rising levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and other pollutants leading to global warming depends on how quickly society accepts the situation and reacts.

Change is coming

Changing direction is impossible. An analogy made by the California Air Resources Board likened the situation to a person rowing a boat into a dock. Because the boat already is moving forward, it can't come to an immediate stop. Pulling the oars from the water will help. But what's needed is immediate reversal. In other words, dip those oars in and start reversing course. The boat will still drift forward, but it will begin to slow and turn.

What we're doing now, the ARB says, is rowing forward as if there's nothing ahead to ram into.

Boom.

In November 2000, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was jointly established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, released a report on the climate scenarios facing the planet. The highly technical report says everything depends on stemming the increase in emissions and decoding "long-term uncertainties."

Natural gas overtakes solar and wind in clean energy race

Is fracking the clean energy future?

Several years ago, I was newly downsized from the newspaper industry that had been my life for the better part of the previous 25 years.

My options were hardly inspiring. My dad was slowly dying of Parkinson's and dementia, royally pissed off at the guy he considered his jailer -- me. The news business tanked. The jobs that remained had a bunch of us old veterans lining up. Salaries were 50 percent or less what we had made.

I had purchased a foreclosed house in terrible shape to rent and subsidize the cost of my father's care. On the positive side, it took six months to repair. I relearned a lot of construction skills.

Clean energy to the rescue

Then after seven months, I found another line of work. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was by then in full swing, and it covered my salary assisting cities and counties in California's San Joaquin Valley installing energy efficient lighting, cooling systems and even insulation. Not too sexy to be certain, but it offered insight into the entirely new realm of clean energy.

Clean energy at the time still had a lot of hurdles, but with federal stimulus money and constantly increasing costs for fossil fuels the holy grail of cost "parity" appeared attainable. A former co-worker and I started blogging about it, using news gathering talents honed over decades to debut the latest studies, technologies and breakthroughs.