Meanders

Harold N. Fisk, Map of ancient courses of the Mississippi river (Mississippi River Meander Belt), 1944:

Satellite image of a part of the Mississippi, taken in 2003:

Read this and weep

Nothing like a bit of cold hard reality on a Monday morning:

In a Washington Post/Stanford University poll last week, a large majority of Americans said global warming was happening. Equally wide margins were opposed to taking mandatory steps at home, or providing assistance overseas, to try to slow it down.

Source: Welcome to the new world of American energy
 

A sea of troubles

over the next 4 decades, the combination of deep-water upwelling and rising atmospheric CO₂ is likely to have profound impacts on waters off the West Coast of the United States, home to one of the world's most diverse marine ecosystems and most important commercial fisheries

- report, paper

A plausible mission statement for geoengineering

...from Oliver Morton:

To explore the development of a well characterised, reversible technology, the use of which promises to curb a profound harm caused by greenhouse warming while not risking comparable harm of some other sort, and –within the context of a continuing transition to a carbon-neutral economy — to work towards deploying such a technology in a safe, timely, transparent and equitable way, if such a course is possible.

Failure in Afghanistan

After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished. Objectives once deemed indispensable, such as nation-building and counterinsurgency, have been abandoned or downgraded, either because they haven’t worked or because there’s no longer enough time to achieve them. Even the education of girls, a signal achievement of the NATO presence in Afghanistan, is at risk. By the end of 2014, when the last Americans are due to stop fighting, the Taliban will not be defeated. A Western-style democracy will not be in place. The economy will not be self-sustaining. No senior Afghan official will likely be imprisoned for any crime, no matter how egregious. And it’s a good bet that, in some remote mountain valley, even Al Qaeda, which brought the United States to Afghanistan in the first place, will be carrying on.

-- from Will civil war hit Afghanistan when the U.S. leaves? by Dexter Filkins