Lake Mead

Lake Mead 55-65 years ago

Lake Mead 7/2/12

It has been a challenging week filled with lovely things like a wake, a funeral, a YouTube email complaining about a 5 year old video, new recording equipment that didn't record telephone calls, and an inability to print the return label because the printer was out of ink.  Enough!  One by one, I will get all of this straightened out.  New equipment is on the way and it can't get here fast enough.

I was hopeful when I read that the EPA revised its standards to cut soot.  According to a recent study, soot, or black carbon, "is the second most important human emission."  Carbon dioxide is #1.

The way I look at climate change is that it is like a disease.  Problems like sea level rise, declining sea ice, warmer temperatures and fierce storms are the  symptoms.  If we focus on the disease--extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere--then the symptoms will subside.  Good luck with that!     


While I was converting my mother's slides to digital, I found this old shot of Lake Mead.  Since I was out there this past summer, I thought it would be interesting to compare the two photographs.  The mountains seem to rise when the water level drops.   In this interactive map, Nevada had record breaking heat in 12 counties, 36 broken heat records and 86 wildfires last year.  3,527 U.S. weather records were smashed in 2012!