New photo galleries online 24 November 04

RED CLOUDS IN CHINA

Mark, I know you had only seconds to escape the fury of the dust storm coming your way. However, I am puzzled by the picture you took later when it was pitch black!

In looking at that photo, I can barely make out an animal. When I looked closer, I notice what appears to be a rather calm little lamb in an open area totally exposed simply staring directly at the protected photographer during the peak of this storm! ;-)

PACIFIC PARADISE LOST

The people of Tuvalu have it bad. Those photos could foreshadow what may become of our coastal cities if we were to fail to act in time. But we shall not let this happen!

PERU’S MELTING POINT

Beautiful Country!

Mark, is it true that the Jacabamba Glacier survived the last ice age before it melted within 20 years? I think you said that in High Tide! That is what I remembered.

You mentioned your friend Tim Helweg-Larsen is promoting contraction and convergence at the Global Commons Institute. I am unfamiliar with these terms or the Institute. Mark, what is this Institute about and precisely what do the terms contraction and convergence mean with respect to climate change prevention?

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

These photos really make your book come alive and add more power to your descriptive words in High Tide. This is especially true for those who have read your book.

I am sure seeing the effects of climate change first-hand gives you a unique perspective that makes it all seem more real. Nothing can replace your unique experiences. Your photos help us come closer to this. Since I have never left the USA, your pictures do help me have a better idea of the awareness you gained from your travels.

It is interesting that your friends from Australia were the ones who encouraged you to post these photos on your web site. Only Australia and Canada have higher per capita emissions than the USA. It proves a point that no matter what a country’s emission problem is, there are proactive people in that country who care.

In fact, it is the people in my country who need to see these photos the most. We do not have many people talking about climate change prevention here in the USA. Our leaders and media seldom mention it. Even at our local Sierra club meeting (my first meeting), it was not the main topic.

However, people started discussing it more when I started my dialogue. Many seemed despondent over the election.

In the UK, I get the impression that climate change issues are a regular topic among the citizens.

So, if you live in the UK, imagine being in the USA whereby the topic is hardly discussed or mentioned in the media and all the energy prices are still rather affordable (at the moment).

I think the Aussies may have our problem in their culture, so it may be that the people in Australia need to see these photos as well. That may be the reason, why your Aussie friends pushed you so much to post your photos.

Now, when they direct people to your site, they can point to your pictures and may encourage even more interest for others to read High Tide!

THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

There are many things to be thankful for and I promised a list plus many other posts. I am still behind with this and let me see what I can get done by the end of the evening (I still have some time, we are 5 hours behind in the USA over the UK).

Concerning Thanksgiving, I think we all must be thankful for the fact that we still have hope in preventing climate change. There is still hope for a tomorrow in this moment we call, Right Now!

Mark came back alive since he had an important mission to fulfill and we are all blessed for that. I am sure Mark is happy to be alive!

I am glad to be alive, but my father is not alive. He died exactly one year ago. He died the day after Thanksgiving last year.

He was doing fine in the hospital, but he took a turn for the worse. We were all not aware of this when we celebrated our usual Thanksgiving dinner last year.

Only when we went to see him later that evening did we become aware so our earlier family gathering was never spoiled.

Furthermore, I was concerned he would not make it past Thanksgiving Day, so at the stroke of midnight, I symbolically tore the calendar page from the hospital wall to mark the next day.

He died that following morning, but not on Thanksgiving Day! That was fortunate for us.

So, I am alive and this is a great day to be alive! Because I am alive, I know that I can make a difference! I think that everyone who is reading this post can say the same thing!

So there are many things we still can be thankful for in this troubled world. Just a moment of inner reflection is all one needs to achieve a state of mind called Thanksgiving.

Above all, the greatest thing to be thankful for is the awareness of the great and noble opportunity we have to change the world for all the generations to come. Because we are alive today, we are responsible to make that happen. It is truly in our hands.

We own the future at this moment and we know the outcome of our efforts and that outcome is success for the simple reason that we refuse to loose the only home we have!

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, may everyone have a blessed day! Enjoy!

Yours Truly, Dan Kellogg

Nice to see these photos to remind me of having read your book a few months back. My experience in traveling the world for the last 30+ years has shown me first hand much of the same experience as you write about. Local people in many places KNOW and KNEW the climate was changing long before it made the news. Even in my home climate, everyone for the last 20 years has noted the dramatic changes. Once a land of ice and snow 6 months of the year, we often have only 2 weeks of a real winter. -20-40 temps. Some years not even that. We used to hike out on the ice as children 20 miles, there has been no ice to set foot on in 12 years!!! No need to go on, you know all about it. Has anyone knowledge of the state of the two glaciers on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand. I visited 16 years ago and they were shrinking fast, are they still there, I mean down out of the mountains near to sea level? Fox and Franz Joseph I think they were??

Very nice pictures indeed. Next time I’m despairing of your aesthetic sensibilities I’ll remember that you save it all for landscapes.

I particularly like the intrepid captions.

Mark,

Thanks so much for your energy and passion as you fight for a sustainable world. May you become a force to be reckoned with!

The photos are great—-my copy of High Tide doesn’t have them, so I’m very pleased to have some sense of what it was like for you. (Be more careful next time.) It somehow looks to me as if the Peruvian glacier was in retreat even in 1980.

It would be nice if there were some past photos of Tuvalu so we could see the before and after effects of the current sea-level rise there.

Mark, did anybody on that Island own a camera years ago? Could you give a prize to the person on that island who comes up with a past photo that compares effectively with one of your photos. The comparison could be very dramatic!

CHANGE IN SUBJECT:

Now, I just made a post [conversation:186=(a new conversation on the main discussion page)] comparing the Climate Stewardship Act of the USA with Kyoto.

I worked hard researching and writing it so I would like to have some useful feedback from you. I would appreciate any comments. I know Lynn and I spent quite some time on this topic as we shared our thoughts in previous posts.

You may find what I now have to share to be quite interesting and very revealing!

(edit: link added by will)

I don’t know of any before-after photos from Tuvalu. This flooding is an irregular event anyway – most of the time the islands are dry and look normal. It would be interesting to see what the little islet looked like beforehand though.