The long narrative poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was published in 1798 during the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Even by this time, however, the devastating consequence of burning coal to fuel the proliferation of factories was evident. Once pristine valleys were transformed into darkened wastelands of smoke and soot, bucolic streams and rivers were turned toxic black, quaint villages were converted to slums of indentured labourers, and the maw of multiple machines was making people into consumable and disposable objects. The artistic reaction to this perceived travesty was Romanticism, an effort to save humanity and nature from a revolution that was perceived to be destroying both.
Continue reading The Quadra Project: A poem for our timeTag Archives: 1.5°C
The Quadra Project: Taking our temperature
In February 2022, our planet was 1.19°C warmer than the pre-industrial temperature of 13.7°C calculated from the collected global records in the 1880s. The Industrial Revolution technically began about 100 years earlier, but no extensive measurements exist to verify the combined surface temperature of both land and water during those years. Between 1920 and 1940, the global temperature rose 0.1°C per decade, 0.2°C during the 1980s, and 0.61°C per decade since 2000. This ascending trajectory corresponds to a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations from about 280 parts per million to about 420 ppm, and ends the 10,000 years of relative climate stability that has allowed human civilization to flourish.
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Report rates oil and gas sector climate pledges ‘grossly insufficient’
By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Eight oil and gas companies are planning hundreds of expansion projects in the coming years, even as the world is already on track to burn through its remaining carbon budget, a new report finds.
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The Quadra Project: Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the human brain to adapt to new kinds of learning, a subject studied by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. In an interview with Clare Wilson in New Scientist magazine (15 May 2021), he makes the passing comment that, “Mother Nature is taking a sort of gamble with humans, in that she drops our brains into the world half-baked and lets experience take over and shape them. Our babies have much less well-developed brains than other animals do at birth. All in all, this has been a successful strategy. We’ve taken over every corner of the planet, invented the internet—even gotten off the planet to the moon.”
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Environment minister says Canada must prepare for “unavoidable” climate risks detailed in new IPCC report
By Natasha Bulowski, Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Canada must do its part to bring down planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, but the country also needs to prepare for harsher consequences from climate change, the federal environment minister said Monday in the wake of a new United Nations report.
“We need to reduce our emissions [but] we’ve entered the era of climate change. We know there will be more catastrophes, we know they will be more severe. So, we need to better prepare,” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault told Canada’s National Observer in an interview.
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