Global Warming Acceleration:
Hope vs Hopium

March 2024
James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha

Japanese businesses and government agencies are pouring billions of yen into various programs across Cambodia and Southeast Asia to reduce the risk of disasters linked to climate change.

The simple explanation for how a system that relies on perpetual growth can be both sustainable and just is

"Then a miracle occurs" Copyrighted artwork by Sydney Harris Inc.

Extreme drought in southern Africa leaves millions on the brink

For over 50 years now, I have mostly voted right of centre. Given the issues we have across the globe such as and others, which arise from overexploitation of natural resources and ecosystems, could someone who supports please explain to me how a system that relies on perpetual growth can be sustainable and just The world has finite resources to sustain life and limited capacity to absorb harm. The more I think about it, the lefter I lean.

Hell no. Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis

Over at the other place, George Tsakraklides makes this brilliant metaphorical point about rising temperatures across the world....

'If you were driving & this was the course of your engines temperature, you would of course stop and call a mechanic'.

He suggests it is capitalism that systematically obstructs meaningful change, but I think that's more about corruption of our political class by the fossil fuels & associated sectors.

corruption happens under other systems too

Embark on a journey through time with a groundbreaking study uncovering how climate change reshapes Earth's spin! Delve into the captivating details of this scientific revelation and its implications for our understanding of time. Read more here:

Brace for a leap in time! Earth's spin is accelerating due to climate change, prompting a rare proposal to subtract a leap second from global clocks. Dive into the fascinating details in this AP News article:

Inbound tourism is the closest that any country, or city, can get to free money

Not true. and takes an enormous toll on a country or city, especially where the ecosystem is particularly fragile. You only need to look at places like SE Asia to see this, or Venice a bit closer to home. The tourism industry has contributed to wildlife destruction, deforestation, water pollution, air pollution, littering, and lets not forget that air travel is a big contributor in . None of that is anywhere close to free money.

This isnt to excuse the silly ad being put out but that irked me somewhat.

If all of humanity consumed like the people in these countries, here's how many days into the year we'd get before we overshot the global biocapacity (i.e., the capacity of ecosystems to regenerate what humans consume and to consume the waste we produce).

: - the Carbon Capture Scam promoted by vested interests to maintain business as usual

We have been so fucked over by the sheer power of corporate greed that even our last remaining unfucked crevices of hope are now pretty much fucked.

This is how many forests we have already cut.

Credit: Elena Doms.

Still kinda gob smacked at how little the Sydney Airport Sustainability report has to say about changes in sea level driven by climate change. I mean, you'd think it would be on their mind.

I found this most fascinating "Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492" et al 2019
The paper attributes a 7ppm drop in CO2 around AD1600 to a population decline of 50 million people in the Americas following the arrival of Europeans. Not mentioned in the paper: the drop also coincides with the up to then-lowest AMOC value as per Rahmstorf et al 2015.

Koch et al has >500 citations so it's probably a widely accepted explanation for the CO2 drop.
But.
The population decline in the Americas was more than balanced by population growth in Europe and Asia. In the century in question global population grew by 19million, IIRC.
This supports your statement that it's not humans per se that cause but human activities.
The manner of landuse in the Americas eg, agriculture without a plough requiring ever more forests to be felled was a highly climate-changing activity.

Fossil Fuel Funding in 2023

In 2023, as people across Canada faced a fossil-fueled affordability crisis and climate disasters continued to ravage the country and the world, the Government of Canada continued providing financial support to an industry that needed to be wound down to avoid catastrophic levels of warming. In 2023, the Government of Canada provided at least $18.553 billion in financial support to fossil fuel companies.

, ,

"Thats right: December It was actually March. January was also March. So was February," he writes. "Instead of winter, we got three months of March, followed by the actual March, making four months total. Will we get another March in April Stay tuned!

We will not meaningfully tackle unless we change the global system.

where we are are extremely bad.

Our local is getting warmer. The plants and trees do not know how to behave and the allergies are getting more of a problem.

I am suffering pretty badly from those allergies, but it was not always the case.

will affect your health. it is affecting mine.

Z At the top of the hour it's Radio Ecoshock (repeat) Presented by Alex Smith. A weekly program about the Latest , authors, issues - from , oceans, forests, , solar storms, the , and .

Frogs Are Going Extinct Here's How We Can Save Them WILD HOPE

MIT tool shows climate change could cost Texans a month and a half of outdoor time by 2080 TechCrunch

Mar 30

2 min video

A tart clip.

The polling results are ambiguous: Canadians tend to say that is important, but not be willing to pay much in costs more recently pocketbook issues seem to have become higher priorities.

But I think the general history of Canadian policy is that we're willing to do our fair share, at least if we see our peer nations taking action.

Abolishing nuclear weapons, a brake on the climate crisis

Has anyone ever done an environmental assessment of the Fediverse

Been trying to read up on the 'carbon equivalent' of various internet-based services. The numbers are all over the map. Depending on whose figures you go by, a single email might represent 4g of carbon equivalent, yet an hour of Youtube, plus 25 searches, plus several emails on Gmail, is supposedly 0.28g. Makes absolutely no sense to me.

And obviously I'm highly suspicious of the self-reported numbers from corporations like google, where the numbers are so low that I can only assume that they got them by doing sketchy carbon accounting using stuff like Offsets or Renewable Energy Certificates.

Anyway I really think Fediverse developers and protocol designers need to start taking responsibility for this network's overall resource consumption. If this place is going to keep growing, sustainability can't be an afterthought.

Here's a little comparison:

Today I did a little tinkering with my personal blog. At this point, other than the HTML+CSS itself, the only things that get transmitted by default are an 18KB font (which is also styled to be a 'pseudo-logo', rather than transmitting a jpeg or something) and a 2KB favicon.

Pretty light, even if it's not as light as something like gemtext.

Meanwhile, in my browser, I have uBlock Origin blocking the download of any media on a website larger than 50KB (more than an entire page of the blog) - and I'm scrolling through Mastodon and it's blocking mf-ing avatars.

Why TF are avatars on here being transferred at filesizes >50KB

They're nice to have, for sure - it's a handy visual cue - but there's no way to justify that kind of filesize for an image that's displayed so small. So much wasted transfer, extra disk space, e-waste at whatever server farms admins are using. Gross.

Can we please start taking this shit seriously

Utah Republicans shut down a free-market solution to climate change. Heres why.

Natural asset companies would restore land, making money as it increases in value. But Utahs leaders see them as an attempt to kill grazing and mining.

That's because Republicans are all about abusing the land until it's useless. They don't care about the future or what they'll leave for their children. It's just greed, greed, greed at all cost.

Today was the hottest March day ever recorded in Poland and Croatia.

From on the birdsite:

28.8 Osijek Hottest March day for CROATIA
26.4 Tarnow Hottest March day for POLAND

yes So will make your wife upset So do something about it crowd only you can shut down
And now you have to

the EU is gutting some of its key policies aimed at cutting pollution and protecting the environment.

Climate scientists say the picture for the planet is not all gloomy. Retreating at this stage would be disastrous for nature and for public confidence in European institutions.

"The Atlas Network describes itself as a nonprofit that aims to secure the right to economic and personal freedom for all individuals through its global network of think tanks. But before it was a network, it was just one think tank: the U.K.-based Institute of Economic Affairs, or IEA, founded by a man named Antony Fisher."

What is the cheapest way to beat climate change

More carbon is being added to the earths atmosphere than is being removed by natural processes.

Meat Industry Using Misinformation to Block Dietary Change, Report Finds Meat and dairy groups have funded adverts that cast vegan products as unhealthy, unnatural and ultra processed.

White man wants to lecture head of state of Guyana on .

The latter was NOT having it.

for the week:

- notes & tabs:
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Just added to our publications library.

"Spatial Persistence of Water Chemistry Patterns Across Flow Conditions in a Mesoscale Agricultural Catchment" is an paper published in the American Geophysical Union's Resources Research.

In this 2021 paper the authors suggest that with a few carefully timed sampling campaigns during high-flow periods, we can pinpoint hotspots.

Read paper:

Browse library: