Our local PBS station showed the first three episodes of BBC's "Sherlock" and then stopped. I don't know if they've resumed this year or not.
Is it because Moriarty is depicted as gay?
When I occasionally stumble upon local PBS fundraisers on the air, I cannot help sensing that the station's managers are a hair's breadth away from saying "Yes sir, may we please have some more, sir?" I've just about given up on PBS, certainly for journalism, recently even for entertainment.
Maybe I was mistaken. Conan Doyle describes Moriarty's habit of rocking his head from side to side, and the actor in the "Sherlock" series played that gesture (as best I recall) together with a sort of sing-song voice, which may or may not have been intended to be taken as gay. I'd like to watch them again myself, but they're not readily available to me.
On another topic, I was finally able to watch the weather disaster video (I don't know why that gave my browser fits, but it took three tries). ellroon, you and I have lived through a lot of disastrous events "together," many of them political and military, but increasingly many of them related to weather. I don't know if you saw last week's NOVA; it was a year old, and was about the deterioration of the antarctic ice... the rate is increasing so fast, and as you've noted, the methane beneath it is beginning to emerge, so much so that I am increasingly convinced that global climate change will be the cause of humankind's demise.
It's a bit like receiving a diagnosis of, say, inoperable brain cancer: you know it will destroy you in a way so awful you can scarcely imagine it, but there is literally nothing that can be done about it now. That's where I believe we are today. If there's cause for legitimate hope, I'd be happy to learn about it.
Stop breathing so much? I have no answers. I despise the naysayers, the people who think that global warming is a somehow weirdly convoluted liberal plot to separate conservatives from their money or their brains ... or something.
My scientist husband is not overly concerned about the methane. I asked if we could burn it and was told that methane is better than the carbon dioxide (and water) that would be created. Also... methane is explosive in high concentrations.
The EPA says that methane is "about 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) by weight..." but then they say "Methane’s relatively short atmospheric lifetime, coupled with its potency as a greenhouse gas, makes it a candidate for mitigating global warming over the near-term (i.e., next 25 years or so)," and only a couple sentences later, "According to the SAR, methane is 21 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere when compared to CO2 over a 100-year time period."
I'm afraid I don't understand that, but as best I can puzzle it out, the methane release helps in the near term, but worsens matters in the long term. The political problem is that if the warming, ice-melting, coastlines-rising effects do not happen right away, say, within a few years, people like the infamous David Duff (see Fallenmonk's threads most days) will all say, "See, I told you so! There's no adverse effect to global warming!" and use the near term non-effect to justify whatever the fuck they want to burn... err, I mean, whatever they want to do. I can't see any way the bad guyz fail to win this one, because they are posing the political question in a "heads I win, tails you lose" manner.
I don't know. Maybe if a continent blows up from the methane below it, people will get the idea... Seriously, I haven't a clue. This may be our swan song. Or it may be just another episode in a long-running serial.
9 comments:
Our local PBS station showed the first three episodes of BBC's "Sherlock" and then stopped. I don't know if they've resumed this year or not.
Is it because Moriarty is depicted as gay?
When I occasionally stumble upon local PBS fundraisers on the air, I cannot help sensing that the station's managers are a hair's breadth away from saying "Yes sir, may we please have some more, sir?" I've just about given up on PBS, certainly for journalism, recently even for entertainment.
I didn't notice gayness as much as the ability to use disguises to distract and confuse. I'll have to go back and watch them again.
Maybe I was mistaken. Conan Doyle describes Moriarty's habit of rocking his head from side to side, and the actor in the "Sherlock" series played that gesture (as best I recall) together with a sort of sing-song voice, which may or may not have been intended to be taken as gay. I'd like to watch them again myself, but they're not readily available to me.
On another topic, I was finally able to watch the weather disaster video (I don't know why that gave my browser fits, but it took three tries). ellroon, you and I have lived through a lot of disastrous events "together," many of them political and military, but increasingly many of them related to weather. I don't know if you saw last week's NOVA; it was a year old, and was about the deterioration of the antarctic ice... the rate is increasing so fast, and as you've noted, the methane beneath it is beginning to emerge, so much so that I am increasingly convinced that global climate change will be the cause of humankind's demise.
It's a bit like receiving a diagnosis of, say, inoperable brain cancer: you know it will destroy you in a way so awful you can scarcely imagine it, but there is literally nothing that can be done about it now. That's where I believe we are today. If there's cause for legitimate hope, I'd be happy to learn about it.
Stop breathing so much? I have no answers. I despise the naysayers, the people who think that global warming is a somehow weirdly convoluted liberal plot to separate conservatives from their money or their brains ... or something.
My scientist husband is not overly concerned about the methane. I asked if we could burn it and was told that methane is better than the carbon dioxide (and water) that would be created. Also... methane is explosive in high concentrations.
So this could get very exciting....
The EPA says that methane is "about 21 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) by weight..." but then they say "Methane’s relatively short atmospheric lifetime, coupled with its potency as a greenhouse gas, makes it a candidate for mitigating global warming over the near-term (i.e., next 25 years or so)," and only a couple sentences later, "According to the SAR, methane is 21 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere when compared to CO2 over a 100-year time period."
I'm afraid I don't understand that, but as best I can puzzle it out, the methane release helps in the near term, but worsens matters in the long term. The political problem is that if the warming, ice-melting, coastlines-rising effects do not happen right away, say, within a few years, people like the infamous David Duff (see Fallenmonk's threads most days) will all say, "See, I told you so! There's no adverse effect to global warming!" and use the near term non-effect to justify whatever the fuck they want to burn... err, I mean, whatever they want to do. I can't see any way the bad guyz fail to win this one, because they are posing the political question in a "heads I win, tails you lose" manner.
Thanks for that info, Steve. How can we counteract this? Besides getting rid of half the 'surplus population', as Scrooge would say....
Al Gore may be fat, wear beige, but he is/ was right.
"How can we counteract this?"
I don't know. Maybe if a continent blows up from the methane below it, people will get the idea... Seriously, I haven't a clue. This may be our swan song. Or it may be just another episode in a long-running serial.
The Perils of Pauline....
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