Floods, Fires, and Heat Domes (the climate change thread) (Part 1)

The environmental costs of “dead white man’s clothes.”

Amazing presentation of this story too.

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Welp… remember when cities running out of water was just hitting our radar with… where was it? Johannesburg? And wasn’t there a city in India too, that had the same problem… now it’s the whole damn middle east? And what is the entire leadership of our species doing? Fucking around. We’re all about to find out.

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Too dry, too wet, too hot, too cold, just too much. This is what we have go look forward to, and TPTB are unwilling to even acknowledge it.

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A couple from the Guardian…

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“When the Floods Come: …”

… the flood water may contain a great many things, including addicted fish and the substances they–and some human addicts–are addicted to.

Methamphetamine pollution elicits addiction in wild fish

ABSTRACT

Illicit drug abuse presents pervasive adverse consequences for human societies around the world. Illicit drug consumption also plays an unexpected role in contamination of aquatic ecosystems that receive wastewater discharges. Here, we show that methamphetamine, considered as one of the most important global health threats, causes addiction and behavior alteration of brown trout Salmo trutta at environmentally relevant concentrations (1 µg l−1). Altered movement behavior and preference for methamphetamine during withdrawal were linked to drug residues in fish brain tissues and accompanied by brain metabolome changes. Our results suggest that emission of illicit drugs into freshwater ecosystems causes addiction in fish and modifies habitat preferences with unexpected adverse consequences of relevance at the individual and population levels. As such, our study identifies transmission of human societal problems to aquatic ecosystems.

ETA:

Good idea.

@DukeTrout : is this well-known? we are loosely tracking pharma and other contaminants in treated effluent at the engineering firm I work at.

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Tweeker Trout
fights like hell, tastes like ammonia?
yuck
Duke, you wanna check in on this one?

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Sounds about right. The fish in the upper Clackamas watershed and lower Mackenzie River fight like they are on a binge, and those are areas that used to have really bad meth problems. Oregon’s managed to get that particular addiction under control, though, so I don’t think it’s still the case.

But that does give me an idea for a new fly pattern:

image

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Fossil free advertising

Finnair is very keen for people to start flying again, after nearly two years of Covid-imposed limitations on their business, and they’ve started a huge ad campaign for holidays abroad.

Their carbon-intensive transport is not to everyone’s liking, however.

The Atmosfair emissions calculator estimates that a return Finnair flight between Helsinki and Athens emits more than 1.3 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide equivalent.

Climate scientists estimate that if humanity is to hit the Paris climate goal of keeping warming to 1.5 degrees, emissions must be limited to 1.5 tonnes of carbon per person per year. So that’s a big chunk of what any individual’s carbon ‘budget’ would look like.

So climate activists from Greenpeace are not happy about Finnair’s marketing campaign. On Monday a group of them scaled the giant advert on the facade of the Forum shopping centre in Helsinki, affixing their own banner reading ‘no fossil advertising thank you’ on top.

Helsingin Sanomat reports that they removed it shortly before 1pm and police said that the protest was peaceful. There was, nevertheless, a criminal complaint that they had breached the peace.

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Climate change intersects with lack of affordable housing, deaths ensue.

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https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/04/komodo-dragon-climate-crisis-sea-levels-rise-extinction-aoe

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Interesting, and technical, assessment of hydrogen as a fuel source

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This. Very much this. He hits on why hydrocarbon-derived hydrogen is fundamentally flawed from an environmental standpoint and also why even green hydrogen can never be a general solution.

Hydrogen had a brief window to maybe be useful before mobile technology drove massive investment in battery tech. There is no way it can possibly measure up at this point outside of maybe large, long distance vehicles, and it really should be thought of as a less efficient battery and not considered as a fuel source.

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Every state in the US is at risk of extreme heat, but the four other factors vary widely. Seven states are at risk of all five climate change threats: California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. On the other hand, only a single state faced just one threat: Vermont.

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