CLIMATE BREAKDOWN reports

Even though I’m doing fieldwork in OREGON right now, I feel a strong emotional and personal connection to this event. The small alpine village where I’ve worked for years—the GÔSCHENERALP—is at the same elevation, only 56km as the crow flies east of BLATTEN. 

#ClimateBREAKDOWN The BLATTEN Glacier Collapse: Climate Tragedy in the Swiss ALPS V.28.2025 mp3 [9Mb] http://www.picture-poems.com/mp3/the-blatten-tragedy_swiss-alps.mp3

Avalanche of 3,000,000 cubic meters rock & ice overwhelms historic high alpine village [in places 200m deep]; debris dams the LONZA RIVER, threatening downstream communities 

[composed w/ GEMINI]

IMAGE: w/ GOOGLE EARTH


The BLATTEN Glacier Collapse: Climate Tragedy in the Swiss ALPS V.28.2025

#SWISS climate researcher Sonia Seneviratne awarded German Environmental Prize 2025

Here’s a summary I generated w/ GEMINI of her work on how dry soil affects large-scale climate

mp3 [3Mb] http://www.picture-poems.com/mp3/From_Swiss_Soil_to_Oregon_Fields.mp3

TEXT (German) http://www.picture-poems.com/pdfs/Prof.%20Dr.%20Sonia%20Seneviratne.pdf

The catastrophic political influence of #AI caused by the new techno billionaire Anti-Christ culture of Silicon Valley is a tragic corruption of AI’s scientific potential.

This report was generated
w/ #GEMINI. It’s not bad.
Musically, the rhythm of the
duo counterpoint is remarkable.

#ClimateBREAKDOWN

IMAGE: CAMAS Overlook at 1300m South WALLOWAS, a landscape under profound threat from a HOTTER DRIER climate. To understand the changes unfolding before our eyes, we need to monitor with great care the seasonal changes of soil moisture content. Both their rhythm, and how they are being affected by rising temperatures.

The Soil ECOLOGY of a HOTTER DRIER climate: The work of Swiss researcher, Dr. Sonia Seneviratne

From the perspective of the high alpine terrain of Northeast, Oregon, where I am currently doing compositional and photography fieldwork, the Pacific Ocean seems impossibly far away. And yet, from the perspective of both climate and daily weather, it is very much present. Coming into Fall Equinox, we are experiencing here in the Northwest extended unprecedented hot drought conditions.

So I thought—in the spirit of trying to understand what climate scientists call tele-connections—I would work with GOOGLE’s AI-model Gemini to generate a report just to help me, and others who are interested in these matters, understand these new relationships.

It is refreshing, working with AI to generate climate breakdown reports. It transcends the current world-wide political climate of anti-science / anti-culture dissent into barbarism, the same barbarism, which, in the 20th century in Europe, gave us both Hitler & Mussolini.

Ironically, the tragic mistake of the remarkably small cohort of billionaires that has profited beyond all rational proportion from the digital revolution, is that it has backed to the hilt—simply out of runaway self-interest—a new US-style species of reactionary. This is a reactionary, both Democrat and Republican, that we might describe as a holding-the-Bible, wrapped-in-the-flag, climate-denying, Judeo-Christian fundamentalist techno nationalist. They will soon discover, I think, that they have undermined the very open society and foundational science that made the great promise of Artificial Intelligence possible in the first place. Tragic, indeed.

Cliff Crego
North Pine Lakes
Eagle Cap Wilderness
OREGON

IMAGE: Fall Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) A circumpolar species. Sentinel Peak, Eagle Cap Wilderness, OREGON. Flowers open bottom to top. Once fully open, a good calendar for “here comes the mountain snow”.



The Blob & Beyond, or the extreme warming of ocean waters off the coast of OREGON

Before we jump into this Gemini-generated DEEP DIVE into climate breakdown, ponderosa pine trees, and the increase of Dwarf Misteltoe infestations killing trees, here’s a little climate meditation I rehearse everyday while doing composition and photography fieldwork in the high alpine WALLOWAS; it helps me “keep WOKE”, ear widen open, so to speak, and focus my energy:

RIGHT ACTION IN THE FACE OF RUNAWAY CLIMATE CHANGE.

The root of Climate Change isn't carbon; It's the destructive nature of thought itself.

I wrongly divide myself from the world; Everything other I either ignore or fear, or seek to control or destroy.

The Geometry of Life is not two guns pointed at each other; it's a circle. 

We’re all Brothers & Sisters, you & I, the Rock, the River, the Tree, the Sky.

Our war against Nature, against ourselves, only ends with a revolution of thought and consciousness.

IMAGE: Dwarf Misteltoe infestation on Ponderosa Pine at 1300m, WALLOWAS, OREGON

Climate’s Deadly Grip, or an increase of Dwarf Misteltoe on Ponderosa Pine In the WALLOWAS

The basic idea of CLIMATE BREAKDOWN Reports is to use the power of AI to generate the kind of urgent, ethical, science-based journalism that a real climate emergency demands. 

In the summer of 2024 I did a bike-hiking tour of Idaho that lasted 120 days with 80 different camps. I was especially interested in exploring the Snake River, Clearwater & Salmon River watersheds. On the ground from the climate breakdown perspective, the effects of a hotter drier climate can be seen everywhere, noticeably with declining snowpack—down 50% since 1950–together with declining mountain forest health. This is especially self-evident when you travel at a slow, natural, I would say more human pace from Mount Borah—at 3859 meters, the highest point of Idaho—on around to the West through the magnificent Craters of the Moon National Park, and then up North again along the Big Wood River into the world-famous Sun Valley. 

I was especially struck by the barren general aspect of Mount Baldy, at 2800 meters the center of Sun Valley‘s ski industry. It has an historical reputation of being an anomalously rich snowfall area. But one glance to it’s south facing aspect is enough to convince an over-the-hill mountaineering skier like me that this can’t possibly be the case, at least not in the new hotter drier climate. (Its more recent wildfire history would also confirm this view, but that is the subject of another report… ) interviews with local skiers revealed that Baldy is now sustained by more than 900 snow cannons, a figure almost twice as high as that cited in the GEMINI-generated AI audio clip below. But that’s just a detail. The fact that commercial media does not want us to see is that commercial skiing is now unsustainable. With great emphasis, I would like to add that this deception—whether deliberate or not—is in “perfect harmony“ with the nonstop undeniably  objective reality of Hydrocarbon Man Car-Culture that roars 24-7 along the still beautiful, eminently bike-friendly, State Highway 75.

So with this as background, let us listen to our Deep Dive about engineering our way out of the snow pack decline problem not just with snow cannons, but now with larger scale cloud seeding weather modification techniques.  

CLOUD SEEDING, or when the ILLUSION OF CONTROL becomes reality…

Composer. Writer. Photographer. Former conductor & founder of the ASKO ensemble.

On a bike/ski/hike trek of the Pacific Northwest studying native plants & climate breakdown 🌲 from sagebrush sea to whitebark pine. Composing off-grid the whole way.

#Sun2Sound 🌕 on Bluesky

THINKING LIKE A STONEPINE, a soundpoem manifesto https://vimeo.com/844665859

“LOVE & WATER, three thought poems w/ coda, PHAROS for small orchestra, “Nightwind”” https://vimeo.com/847079690 

CURRENTLY on mt bike/ski/climbing trek through Pacific Northwest, working on a photobook about WHITEBARK PINE COLLAPSE and CLIMATE CRISIS. BASES in the WALLOWAS | AMSTERDAM | ALPS. 

WEEKLY photo/poetry updates at www.picture-poems.com & THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE new music, poetry & dance performance project at www.cs-music.com

ALWAYS ON THE LOOKOUT for progressive, tech-savy, instrumental virtuosi interested in dialogue & collaborative undertakings.

CONTACT cliff@picture-opoems.com
Or on SKYPE or FACETIME @cliffcrego

MUSIC? The one thing humans do,
that makes the rest of nature jealous.