Gotta give a shout-out to veteran writer Michael Specter for his story "Climate by the Numbers" in the New Yorker's November 11 issue. It provides a distinctly different slice through the world's climate problems. Specter provides an intense, detailed, and long account of a gang of San Francisco-based geeks in private industry who are selling crop and disaster insurance to farmers. But they also provide to their customers a jaw-dropping, entrepreneurial aggregation, re-packaging, and innovative integration of weather and climate data so that they can better avoid waste of money on fields that might be too dry, too wet, too immature, or too anything for picking, fertilizing, planting, or whatever. It thus describes how the realities of climate change and their impacts, even if not overtly discussed with the customers as global warming, are steadily weaving themselves into the daily rhythm of thousands of planters and stock raisers who by and large are part of that conservative, bed-rock slice of America's citizenry that tends to regard global warming as a liberal hippy tree-hugging research grant-luring myth.
If you're not a subscriber, that link above leads most likely to a pay wall after the first several grafs. A lot of tracker readers do subscribe, but a lot don't. It's worth running it down one way or the other.
While I'm at it, might as well provide a second shout-out to another New Yorker climate change and environmental ace for a recent news story:
- Elizabeth Kolbert (daily comment blog): Is It Too Late to Prepare for Climate Change ; A quick-response analysis of what a recently leaked draft IPCC report on climate change impacts means. (see also previous post).
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