I Totally Misread This Headline

 I totally thought this was all about cirrus versus cumulus:

Arizona Gov. Vetoes Bill Forcing State Cloud Adoption

A Comeuppance

I had one of those humbling moments today at work.  One of the shop supervisors had been asking me for a procedure for how to puncture aerosol cans for proper disposal with our can piercing device.  I knew we'd had some kind of written directions, but I couldn't find them in the computer system.  Then, the safety consultant sent me a picture showing some aerosol cans in a scrap hopper that hadn't been punctured.  I was kind of ticked off that the guys in the shop hadn't been puncturing the cans with the can piercer, and decided to head out that way, figure out the process, and then write up a procedure so it would get done correctly. 

I headed over to where the scrap hopper was, found a few cans that hadn't been punctured, and hauled them over to the can piercer.  I punctured the first couple, then loaded in one can that was about half-full.  I pulled down the lever, and nothing happened.  I slowly backed off the handle, and suddenly the can flew up, struck the top of the cabinet the waste barrel was in, and bounced around, all while spewing paint everywhere.  My arms were covered, my glasses had spatter on them, and the buttons of my shirt were noticeably blue.  I'd forgotten to put the covering lid over the end of the can before I punctured it.  I pretended nothing had happened, and didn't even look around to see if anybody had noticed.  I quickly went to clean up and tried to not let on that I'd been so dumb.  After getting the mess under control, I headed back to my cubicle. 

Back in the office, I quickly found the can piercing company's website and downloaded the operating instructions.  I sent them in an email to the supervisor, along with a message that we needed to get all the cans in the scrap hopper punctured.  I was a little sheepish about talking to him, since I still had some paint showing that I couldn't get removed.  A couple of hours later, I had to go to the shop, so I stopped in to make sure he knew what needed to be done.  He hadn't gotten the email yet, so I explained to him what had to be done.  Then I told him I had a story to tell.  I explained all about how ticked off I had been, and how the can piercer I thought was self-explanatory had shown me up.  He told me that the same thing had happened to him.  I guess this is a good example of why safety instructions have to be well-written, even when they seem to be basic common sense.

Haunted by Living in the Middle of Nowhere

Fusion:

The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It’s the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all. The nearest neighbor is a mile away, and the closest big town has just 13,000 people. It is real, rural America; in fact, it’s a two-hour drive from the exact geographical center of the United States.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor’s land find themselves in a technological horror story.

For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat....
At its most precise, an IP address can be mapped to a house. (You can try to map your own IP address here.) At its least precise, it can be mapped only to a country. In order to deal with that imprecision, MaxMind decided to set default locations at the city, state and country level for when it knows only roughly where the IP address lives. If it knows only that an IP address is somewhere in the U.S., and can’t figure out anything more about where it is, it will point to the center of the country.
 As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.

As a result, for the last 14 years, every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.
Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.

That is just absolutely terrible, terrible luck.  Why not 40.000, 98.5000?  Anyway, it would probably help if people guessed on their own that that spammer doesn't live in the middle of freaking Kansas.

Cash-Strapped Farmers, Ctd.

I'm not sure why I didn't post this chart when I linked to this article earlier in the week:

Remember back in the boom when everybody was saying, "this time is different, all these purchases are cash, and farmers don't have operating loans like they did in the '70s?"  Yes, I remember them saying that, too.

End of Church League Weekend Links

Well, last night the scrappy team of papists fell to the thugs of P-Hill to end our quest for a trophy and the greater glory of God, which means that in upcoming weeks I might actually get the links ready to publish on Saturday morning.  While defeat at the hands of the forces of evil takes a little bit of joy out of the week, I did find a few stories for your enjoyment:

Last Breaths in a Spanish Bullring - SBNation

This Is Our Youth: The Olympic-Industrial Complex and Katie Ledecky - Charles Pierce

European Soccer's Poor Little Rich Clubs - Wall Street Journal.  I'd like to see the Big Ten and the MAC promote and demote teams from one conference to the other.  B-G beats Indiana?  The next year, B-G is in the Big Ten while Indiana battles Ball State for conference superiority. That would be fun.

In Search Of A Drought Strategy, California Looks Down Under - The Salt

Eight Reasons Why the Iowa State Fair is The Best - Modern Farmer and Eating Healthy At The Iowa State Fair Means Salad On A Stick - The Salt.  Not for this guy.

When the Great Alpaca Bubble Burst - Priceonomics

Deere Profit Tumbles Amid Glut of Used Farm Equipment at Dealers - Wall Street Journal.  The next few years are going to be pretty rough in rural areas.

A River Runs Yellow - The Atlantic

Will the Pope Change the Vatican? Or Will the Vatican Change the Pope? - National Geographic 

Earth on Track for Back-to-Back  Records for Highest Temperatures - Bloomberg

What We Don't Know About Canada Might Hurt Us - FiveThirtyEight.  About the damage caused by conservatives' disdain for government statistics-gathering.  A major pet peeve of mine.

21 Questions for Donald Trump - National Memo.  About a month old, but gaining attention.

Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny - Matt Taibbi.  Reminiscent of the late days of Campaign 2008.  The ugliness of dumb, white America (or 'Merica) is never far below the surface.

Presidential Sensation Deez Nuts Is a 15-Year-Old Iowa Farm Boy - The Daily Beast

Are You an Angry Voter? Take a Deep Breath - Bloomberg View

Where the population of Europe is growing - and where it is declining - Berliner Morgenpost

This is the most common job held by immigrants in each state - Vox

There's Something In The Water

And that would be fertilizer. And algae. And microcystin:

A vast Lake Erie algae bloom returns, captured by a NASA satelite on July 28. NASA/Earth Observatory

The citizens of Toledo, Ohio, have embarked upon their new summer ritual: stocking up on bottled water. For the second straight year, an enormous algae bloom has settled upon Lake Erie, generating nasty toxins right where the city of 400,000 draws its tap water.
It's a kind of throwback to Toledo's postwar heyday, when the Rust Belt's booming factories deposited phosphorus-laced wastewater into streams that made their way into Lake Erie, feeding algae growths that rival today's in size. But after the decline of heavy industry and the advent of the Clean Water Act, there's a new main source of algae-feeding phosphorus into the beleaguered lake: fertilizer runoff from industrial-scale corn and soybean farms.As I reported last August, the trouble is that freshwater blooms produce a toxin called microcystin, which can trigger nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, severe headaches, fever, and even liver damage. For three days last year, microcystin in Toledo's water exceeded federal limits, and the city had to urge residents not only to avoid drinking it, but also to use bottled water to wash dishes and bathe infants.
Toledo has since implemented an early warning system near its water intake for monitoring potential microcystin contamination in Lake Erie—one, it hopes, will prevent a repeat of last year's don't-drink-the-water event by giving the city time to run its carbon-filtration system when toxin levels at the source spike. The filtration system does work to push microcystin levels to below the legal limit, said Justin Chaffin, research coordinator for Ohio State University's Ohio Sea Grant program, which coordinates efforts to monitor the lake's algae blooms. The problem, he said, is that it costs thousands of dollars per day to run...
Toledo's fertilizer-haunted water supply is hardly an isolated case. Similar situations persist throughout the Corn Belt, from Ohio in the east to Nebraska in the west. To grow the great bulk of corn and soybeans that fuel our food system, the Corn Belt uses massive amounts of fertilizer—and it doesn't stay put. For example, Iowa's Department of Natural Resources has had to issue 131 advisories since 2006—and 17 so far this year—warning people to keep themselves and their pets out of lakes made toxic by these phosphorus-fed blooms. Ohio has eight such warnings active, apart from the drama in Toledo.
Then there's the related problem of another chemical fertilizer used on farms, nitrogen. It enters drinking water supplies in the form of nitrate, which can restrict the blood's ability to carry oxygen and is thus particularly hazardous to infants. Regular low-level exposure to nitrate has been associated with birth defects as well as cancers of the ovaries and thyroid. The waterworks utility of Des Moines, Iowa, claims to have spent $1.5 million since December 2014 keeping nitrate levels below legal limits, and claims it needs to invest as much as $183 million in new filtration equipment to battle the problem going forward. Back in June, Columbus, Ohio, had to warn pregnant women and babies to avoid the tap because nitrate levels had spiked above legal limits. The same thing has forced the Nebraska town of Prosser to warn its residents away from tap water for more than a year—and to raise $84,000 to put a reverse-osmosis filter in every kitchen.
Of course, the Corn Belt's fertilizer runoff doesn't just wreak havoc within the region. The great bulk of these pollutants make their way to the Gulf of Mexico through the Mississippi River, where they feed one of the globe's largest annual fish-killing algae blooms. According to the latest National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projections, this year's version will be just "average" in size—blotting out sea life in area of some 5,400 square miles, roughly the area of Connecticut.

This is going to continue to grow as an issue, especially as larger yields require the use of more and more fertilizer.  Locally, we've seen the algae blooms in Grand Lake St. Mary's blamed on the massive concentration of livestock in the watershed, and the resultant manure runoff.  However, as this article highlights, I doubt that livestock agriculture is primarily to blame in the Maumee River watershed, or in a number of others in the Corn Belt.  This is one more issue farmers should get out in front of instead of continuing with business-as-usual (animal welfare and antibiotic use come to mind) until non-farmers get pissed off enough to kick them in the nuts.  However, I'm not holding my breath on that.

Bananas at Risk?

Maybe:

Six decades after a banana-killing fungus all but wiped out plantations across Latin America, a new strain threatens to destroy global harvests.
A type of Fusarium wilt appeared this year in Australia’s main banana-growing state after spreading to Asia and Africa. While the fungus has been around since the 1990s and has yet to affect top exporter Ecuador, Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. called it a potential “big nightmare.” The United Nations says the disease threatens supply, and Latin American growers are taking steps to limit the risk.
The industry survived the demise of the top-selling Gros Michel banana in the 1950s by switching to a different variety, called the Cavendish. But this time, there’s no ready substitute. Americans now eat bananas almost as much as apples and oranges combined, and are the biggest buyers in an export market valued at more than $7 billion.
“We don’t have anything that can replace the Cavendish,” said Gert Kema, a plant research leader at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who studies banana diseases.
Part of the problem is the way the market evolved more than a century ago, relying on a single breed rather than several varieties.
In 1870, the founder of what became Chiquita Brands International Inc. imported 160 bunches of bananas from Jamaica to the U.S. that he sold at a profit, kicking off an American industry built around perishable tropical fruit from overseas that competes with cheap, locally grown apples.

I don't think that the risks of genetic homogeneity are limited to bananas. Oh, wait, that's in the article:

A lack of plant diversity isn’t unique to bananas. After a history in which more than 7,000 species were cultivated for human consumption, today just four crops -- rice, wheat, corn and potatoes -- are responsible for more than 60 percent of human energy intake, the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization estimates.

The history of the fruit is fascinating.  And disturbing.

Engineers vs. Normal Human Beings

Malcolm Gladwell writes about auto recalls, engineers and non-engineers, including an interview with an engineer from the Ford recall office who handled the Pinto case.  Here is a description of the Toyota sticky accelerator situation:

In the wake of the sticky-pedal problem, customers started complaining that Toyotas were prone to sudden, unintended acceleration. “Whenever someone called in to say, ‘I’ve had an episode of unintended acceleration,’ Toyota would dispatch a team of engineers,” said Roger Martin, a former dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and a member of the advisory panel that Toyota put together during the crisis. “And they would do a thorough examination of the car and pronounce it fine—because it always was—and assure the owner that everything was going to be fine. They were probably just pressing the accelerator when they thought they were pressing the brake. There wasn’t a problem. Just be more careful next time. And they got more and more complaints.”
The engineers were right. A series of exhaustive investigations by federal regulators, with help from NASA engineers, established that the perception of an electronic failure was almost certainly illusory. The problem was caused either by the fact that some people put in poorly fitted, nonstandard floor mats or by the fact that drivers were pressing the accelerator thinking that it was the brake. (Pedal error, as it is known, is a well-documented source of vehicle malfunction, affecting drivers of many makes and models.) Cars are engineered to be tolerant of pedal error: the driver who depresses the accelerator, thinking it’s the brake, still has the option of simply putting the car in neutral or turning it off. (That’s one of the reasons that cars have gearshifts and ignition switches.) But in the public mind a car that accelerated unexpectedly was broken. The teams of engineers that Toyota sent out didn’t make the problem better. They made it worse.
“The Toyota guy explained this to the panel,” Martin went on. “He said, ‘Here’s our process.’ So I said to him, ‘What do you imagine the people are thinking? They’re shaking like a leaf at the side of the road and after that whole experience they are told, “The car’s fine. Chill out. Don’t make mistakes anymore.” Of course they are not going to be happy. These people are scared. What if instead you sent people out who could be genuinely empathetic? What if you said, “We’re sorry this happened. What we’re worried about is your comfort and your confidence and your safety. We’re going to check your car. If you’re just scared of this car, we’ll take it back and give you another, because your feeling of confidence matters more than anything else.” ’ It was a sort of revelation. He wasn’t a dumb guy. He was an engineer. He only thought about doing things from an engineer’s standpoint. They changed what those teams did, and they started getting love letters from people.”

I have long classified people into two groups, engineers and salesmen.  In this system, engineers like to deal with numbers, and don't really like interacting with people.  Salesmen, on the other hand, love dealing with, and manipulating people, are narrative-based, and generally disregard or don't understand numbers (a third, much scarier category is people who understand numbers, think like an engineer, but deal with people and sell like a salesman. I would probably classify those folks as sociopaths).  It is simplistic and over-generalizing, but if you were to ask my opinion of a person, I would have probably already classified the individual as engineer or salesman (and there is some projection on my part).  Gladwell uses some of the same types of classifications in this article, but instead of salesmen, he looks at politicians (who are generally selling themselves and policies).

The article also touches on the human influences and politics that impact whether recalls are made, or even if some of the issues get brought up for discussion.  This really is a challenge when it comes to quality and rework decisions.  There are a lot of times I get stuck making a decision about whether to correct some imperfection on a product, and those calls can be tough to make sometimes.  When it is about aesthetics, I'm probably not the person to ask, but when it is about safety or function, I'm much better.  However, I often find myself weighing whether the slight risk of failure justifies causing a large amount of rework.  On this, I have a hard time making sure I don't get talked out of my initial judgment, as I weigh the decision.  Luckily, most of the guys on the shop floor know I'm not out to make their lives difficult, and they'll accept the call when they have to fix something.  Overall, engineers do have to make a lot of judgments about acceptable risks, and while they are sometimes wrong, they generally are correct, even if it doesn't seem like it to the rest of society.  Often, when companies make a bad call on safety issues, it is bean-counters or managers overruling engineers because they don't want to address the costs.  Sometimes, it is engineers not understanding human emotions or politics.

Bad News For Baseball

Washington Post:

Baseball: the Republican Party of professional sports (in a number of ways, not just demographically).

Frozen Four

Boy, I forgot all about the NCAA hockey semifinals being on TV tonight.  Providence is going to the championship game, and will play the winner of North Dakota and Boston University.  Go Friars.

Bad Day at Work

Projecting a Bad Year

USDA:

What's that story about the 7 good years?

Color Me Shocked

From Vox:

Bridge Collapse in Cincinnati Kills One

Enquirer:

An old bridge on Interstate 75 was undergoing preparation for demolition late Monday when it collapsed, killing a construction worker and shutting down a stretch of the interstate for what could be days.
The "catastrophic pancake collapse" happened about 10:30 p.m. as a crew prepared for demolition of the old Hopple Street overpass, according to a statement from the City of Cincinnati. It was part of the old northbound off-ramp to Hopple Street. The new bridge is now open.

Yikes.  I would guess that somebody accidentally removed the wrong column or cut the wrong beam, or the demolition engineers missed how deteriorated a main support actually was.  Now the job is to clean up the mess as quickly and safely as possible.  It's not everyday you have a major interstate highway shut down in a metro area, but considering the amount of infrastructure in need of repair, and the lengths to which projects have to go to maintain traffic, it is somewhat surprising we don't have more of these accidents.  Luckily this wasn't as big of a disaster as the I-35W bridge collapse, but it is a reminder of the potential dangers and massive challenges facing the Tri-State region as it slowly moves toward the replacement of the Brent Spence Bridge.

Is This The Year For a China Meltdown?

Bank of America thinks it might be:

China is at mounting risk of a financial crisis this year as growth sputters and deflationary pressures trigger a wave of defaults, Bank of America has warned.

The US lender told clients that a confluence of forces are coming together that threaten to chill the speculative mania on the Shanghai stock exchange and to expose the underlying fragility of China’s $26 trillion edifice of debt.

“A credit crunch is highly probable,” said the bank in a report entitled “Deflation, Devaluation, and Default”, written by David Cui and Tracy Tian.

They said the country’s highly-leveraged companies cannot safely withstand President Xi Jinping’s drive to stamp out moral hazard and wean the country off excess credit, warning that the mix of slower growth and excess debt “could prove lethal for the financial system”.

The report warned that it is rare for countries to escape either a financial crisis, or major bank failures, a currency upset, a sovereign crisis – or a mix of these – after letting credit grow at such vertiginous rates.
“The most likely scenario is a bad debt surge as growth slows, followed by a credit crunch in the shadow banking system, followed by a major recapitalisation of the banks,” said Mr Cui.
The report said China spent 15pc of GDP to rescue lenders in the late 1990s but the scale of the problem is much greater today, and this time the government cannot resort to fresh stimulus so easily.
Loans have jumped by roughly 100pc of GDP in the past five years under most estimates. This is twice the pace of growth in Japan over a comparable period before the Nikkei bubble burst in 1990, or in the US before the Lehman crisis in 2008. 
Standard Chartered said total credit has surpassed 250pc of GDP once shadow banking and offshore lending are included, an extremely high level for an emerging economy without mature markets or layers of accumulated wealth.
Mr Cui said the explosive rise on the Shanghai stock market - up 50pc in barely three months - is being driven by “blue-sky talk” and $180bn of margin lending from brokers. It is happening at a time of deteriorating earnings. “When the sell-off happens, we suspect that it will not be orderly,” he said. The Shanghai composite index may fall back from 3,300 to 2,400 before it settles in a trading range.
He advised investors to stick to defence stocks or equities linked to the nuclear industry given that both are shielded from Mr Xi’s efforts to shake out excessive capacity in Chinese industry.
Bank or America said China has been in factory gate deflation for 33 months and the downward slide appears to be deepening.

That is terrible news for commodities.  Just a guess, but I doubt a Communist government will be able to weather a capitalist meltdown very effectively. But, then again, capitalist countries suck at handling deflation, too.

Columbus Tunnel Project Sees Unexpected Challenges

Dispatch:

Water and a giant hunk of bedrock 200 feet beneath Columbus has bogged down the city’s giant boring machine, leading to a two-year delay and a $29.5 million cost overrun.
The machine, nicknamed “Marsha,” is boring a 4.5-mile, 23-foot-wide tunnel that was originally to be completed this month. The tunnel is supposed to catch sewer overflows that would otherwise spill into the Scioto River during storms. The project was originally estimated to cost $342 million....
The $26 million custom machine, like something out of science fiction, was built to drill through mostly dry bedrock. But city engineers’ estimate of water levels didn’t account for millions of gallons of water that travel underground, below the Scioto River.
Instead of grinding through dry rock, Marsha was choking on a water/rock/mud mixture called slurry, which is kind of like wet concrete.
The 500-foot-long drilling machine is a cross between a submarine and a huge mechanical worm with a 95-ton cutting wheel on the front. The machine was built in Germany to digest dry rock by sending it back through a crushing screw shaft in its belly, depositing the crushed rock on conveyers that take it to the surface.
The Kenny Construction Co., based in Illinois, and the Japanese-based Obayashi group designed Marsha based on specifications provided by the city....
Marsha was to be able to drill through and remove about 68 feet of dry rock a day, or about 40 feet a day if there was water. The steel cutters on the machine have to be replaced about every 500 feet.
But the unexpected amount of water in the ground forced it to remain closed. The pipes weren’t big enough to handle the slurry because large chunks of rock would make it through the grinder.
For much of the past two years, Marsha has drilled about 25 feet per day.
At one point when the cutters needed to be replaced, the city had to hire expert divers for $1 million. The divers could work only for minutes at a time in the high-pressure underground water to replace the cutting wheels.
Davies said engineers then spent nearly a year reconfiguring Marsha with new, larger pipes and ripping out the conveyer system to add another large screw that would break down the rock even more.
Dax Blake, an engineer and the city’s sewers and drains administrator, said the city had drilled about 200 holes to test the ground before the project began.
“You never really know what’s that far underground, so all we could do was take those samples and calculate out what was down there,” he said.

 Wow, 200 test holes is a bunch.  I bet some engineer is feeling pretty bad about this project.

Toronto Porn

Toronto Skyline Porn from Ryan Emond on Vimeo.

Oh, wait. Toronto Skyline Porn. Yeah, I knew that.

More Bad News For Grain Farmers

WSJ:

China's grain cupboard is overflowing.
As the harvest looms next month, the country is on track for an 11th year of bumper grain crops. But production is too much, even for the world's most populous nation, with warehouses bursting at the seams and posing a dilemma for policy makers.
Estimates from state media say the government will be sitting on 150 million tons of grains that include three of the most important crops for China: rice, wheat and corn. That is double the 75 million tons last year and adds to an oversupply of these agricultural commodities that is pressuring prices lower.
"Chinese officials always talk about having a big harvest," said Fred Gale, an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "That sounds like a good thing, as they have been worried about supply keeping up with demand. But now, China seems to be struggling with surpluses of most of their commodities."
The glut of grains is being lauded in a country that grappled with acute food shortages and starvation as recently as a few decades ago. But China is paying far more than necessary to feed its people and it will be forced to sell down its surpluses into a global market already suffering from oversupply, potentially driving down prices further.
The situation has exposed China's inefficient and expensive government subsidy program aimed at keeping farmers' incomes up. The government is struggling with how to protect its rural residents while cutting production of these perishable commodities to save money and keep surpluses down.

The only real hope for U.S. farmers was exports, so this is bad news, too.

Lake Algae in the News Again

Toledo warns residents not to drink city water:

Ohio's fourth-largest city has warned residents not to consume its water after tests revealed the presence of a toxin possibly related to algae on Lake Erie.
Toledo issued the warning early Saturday. It said tests at one treatment plant returned two sample readings for microsystin above the standard for consumption.
The city warned against boiling because it will only increase the toxin's concentration. The advisory covers city residents and those in Lucas County served by the city's water supply.
The city's advisory says Lake Erie may have been affected by a bloom of harmful algae that produces the toxin. Consuming the tainted water could result in vomiting, diarrhea and other problems.

Ag pollution in the Maumee River basin has previously been fingered as one of the leading causes of algae blooms in the western basin of Lake Erie.  Any news like this puts additional pressure on farmers, and rightfully so. This "do not drink" advisory is reported to affect 400,000 residents.

Coal Production In Pictures

The Atlantic features photos of the extremes of coal production, from massive electric-powered excavators to human laborers with baskets on their backs.  The photos from coal mines in India remind me of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (for an interesting [but totally unrelated to this post] look at the back story to why Temple of Doom was so dark [shocker: because of relationship troubles with women], go here):

8 year old Prabhat Sinha, from Assam, carries a load of coal weighing 60kg, supported by a head-strap, as he ascends the staircase of a coal mine on April 16, 2011 near the village of Khliehriat, India. After traversing treacherous mountain roads, the coal is delivered to neighboring Bangladesh and to Assam from where it is distributed all over India, to be used primarily for power generation and as a source of fuel in cement plants. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images) #

On quibble with this feature at The Atlantic: the headline says, "Global Coal Usage Reaches 44 Year High," followed by this:

Earlier this week, BP issued its annual "Statistical Review of World Energy" report. According to the report, coal was the fastest-growing fossil fuel worldwide last year, and "coal's share of global primary energy consumption reached 30.1 percent, the highest since 1970". Despite a decrease in coal usage by North America and Europe over the past several years (due in large part to cheaper natural gas), global coal consumption has risen to new highs, driven by the growing and power-hungry markets of China and India.

That is as a percentage of primary energy consumption, not as total tonnage. World coal consumption has more than doubled from 1980 (4.122 billion short tons) to 2012 (8.449 billion short tons).  That isn't a 44 year high, it is an all-time high in the history of the world.  If you are concerned about a potential climactic calamity due to fossil fuel use, I think that is baked into our cake.  I don't think we're undoing all that damage.