Metallica Monday

So my week kicked off with a big bang. Literally. My BF took me to the Metallica concert on Monday. The first time I've seen them live and wow. Had to be one of the best rock concerts I've ever seen. Our seats were great!  Check out some of the photos (keep in mind the quality is crap - from my camera phone).

As for their set - the first few songs were from their latest album Death Magnetic. Although I'm not familiar with those tunes - very impressive.  From there, they went to a few fan favorites with Seek & Destroy and One. Then the fever-pitch rose with  Enter Sandman and Unforgiven. I have to say the highlight for me was hearing the epic Master of Puppets. If there's one song that defines this band (if that's possible), I think it's MoP. It was the showstopper that brought the crowd to a frenzy.


I'll be checking-in later this week with a new rant on the environment.

Until then, here's a very clever animated short for your viewing pleasure.

Binge and Purge

Shaken, not stirred

So it's blog action day. The subject this year ? Climate Change.

First and last, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion. We ask bloggers to take a single day out of their schedule and focus it on an important issue.

I took a geology course in college that was dubbed 'rocks for jocks' because it was considered an easy credit. While I enjoyed the plate tectonics as such, it was learning about past climates that tweaked my interest on the subject. Climate Change, formerly known as Global Warming, is the latest media vernacular when reporting on all things green.

I find fear is the number one tactic used by environmental brain-trusts when trying to get their message across. If we don't do X now, we'll get Y later than eventually Z. (Oooh not Z). And Y not. Fear motivates a lot of human behavior - fear of failure - fear of dying - fear of flying - fear of work. I personally fear hummus. When someone puts a bowl of that stuff in front of me I have to leave the room. It's scary. I shudder just thinking about it. Fear as a tactic to fight Climate Change is one dimensional. Actionable yes but educational no. You don't conquer fears by not understanding them. (I'm getting therapy for the hummus btw).

How does one conquer climate change exactly ? Don a toque when it's cold?

As we look to take action on Blog Action Day - let's try something other than fear as the motivator for change.

So here's my offering. Climate Change for Christina is 2 fold. The first knowing Climate Change is about the earth's natural evolution over time. You know as we orbit around the sun, stuff happens, ummm, like the southern continents get warmer, I think, umm, yup they do this time of year cause, yah know, they're closer to the sun. Over longer periods of time, the earth's climate has a tendency to change drastically.

The second fold of Climate Change for Christina is mankind. Our nature as survivor & species taking up more of earth's real-estate as each year passes. Our ability to reproduce, adapt and evolve (ha ha) to the ever changing climate makes for some bad-ass mammals.

Making sense of the fact that population growth continues while the earth remains the same size is for the scientists to figure out. They've got a pretty good idea now. Yet it's increasingly become more complex and a problem we need to address sooner rather than later. So they say. Thus Climate Change as the subject de jour - and taking better care of the environment - the action. The solution is complex - improving how we re-produce renewable non-carbon-emitting-energy products for the masses.

Quiz Time

Q: What generates emission free electricity, cools our nuclear tubes and makes for a refreshing beverage? Oil? no. Coal? no. Cow poop? No.

A: For Aqua. In the great white north, we have an abundance of the most important resource of all things life on the planet. The majority of Canada’s power production (just under 60%) comes from hydroelectricity. In Ontario, Nuclear and Hydro combined represent 75% of power production – all of which is non carbon emitting. (*Source: laforet.ca)

I'll leave this post with a question.

Q: If our greatest natural resource is the key to human survival, the planet's well being & provider of clean energy. Why we talkin' bout 'clean coal', building wind farms and solar panels when we're ignoring what's got us this far ?


A: (Fill in the blank comment form)

Apocalyptica

Normally I'm a bright, sunshiny person, and even though I'm well aware of the potential dangers our race faces if we keep ruining our planet, I don't usually buy into the doomsayers who predict the end of the world as we know it. I like to think positively and work proactively, but sometimes it's hard to look away when somebody is holding up the big cardboard sign stating The End Is Nigh. And this article, in particular, struck me because I'll admit to having kind of a dark sense of humour at times, and this guy was kind of funny even as he was sounding the death knell of our culture.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, predicts that if climate change continues undeterred, we could see massive worldwide disaster on a scale heretofore unseen in human history. Even a nine-degree (Fahrenheit) raise in global temperature, a conservative estimate based on studies, would result in disruption of the monsoon, collapse of the Amazon rain forest and the meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, not to mention deoxygenation of huge tracts of the world's oceans (which would prove devastating to marine life and the ecosystem in general). Based on these apocalyptic findings, Dr. Schellnhuber predicts the death of over 75% of the human population, bringing our total numbers down to a more ecologically supportable 1 billion inhabitants.

On the bright side, he told the Danish hosts of the recent climate meeting in Copenhagen, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet would "increase your usable land by, I don't know, 10,000 percent." Funny guy.

This is scary stuff. Remember, I said conservative estimates, which means Dr. Schellnhuber's calculations are a better-case scenario. It could be much, much worse. How many signs to we have to wave around before governments, institutions and individuals start taking this issue seriously? This isn't a John Wyndham novel, folks, this is real life. Wake up.

Here's the full article.

Good idea, bad idea...

I have always been a huge supporter of NASA. I think the idea of going into space is, in a word, awesome. There are countless things we can learn about our world and our place in the universe by venturing beyond the boundaries of our own atmosphere.

Take, for example, the recent NASA initiative to launch a specialized research platform into orbit -- the Orbiting Carbon Observatory was designed to monitor greenhouse effects in the atmosphere in an attempt to learn more about the process and, hopefully, how we can curb the negative properties of the greenhouse effect.

Awesome, right? Right.

Except it fell into the sea.

Yes, you read that right.

You know, I really want to give these guys a lot of rope. They're the people that put men on the moon, for goodness' sake. They've charted far-off galaxies by sticking a huge telescope in orbit; they have pushed back the boundaries of scientific exploration farther than our parents could ever have imagined. Clearly, these are some of humanity's greatest minds.

So why can't they make things work the way they're supposed to?

Challenger. Columbia. The Mars rover. And now this. Two exploded shuttles and a handful of dead astronauts, a robot that journeyed millions of miles just to smash into a planet, and a $256M orbital platform that now resides at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Like I said, I'm all about finding new and innovative research methods to help us understand our planet better. But I can't help but think that $256M might have been better spent elsewhere. If you're going to invest that kind of money into a project it would help if the project was a success.

NASA -- get it together!