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

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Cue Joe Manchin crying.

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Denial is getting harder, but the hardcore are just digging in deeper. If we are not past the tipping point, we are balanced on the edge. And still we are putting carbon into the atmosphere as quickly as we can.

Episode 18 Running GIF by The Simpsons

ETA: From the article:

One-in-100-year floods are now happening so often, the term may soon need to change, Robert Mason, extreme hydrologic events coordinator and Delaware River master for the U.S. Geological Survey, told ABC News.

Good lord, could we undersell this any more? “100 year flood” is utterly meaningless, when they happen every fucking week!

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You know, you’ve already got your hands full with a different man-made disaster killing people all over the world.

Yes, it’s a huge problem that has to be tackled, but leave it to others. You need what little peace of mind you can eke out in your ‘free time’ after your day job.

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That can’t be good…

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this isn’t a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it’s a film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise that “nothing will fundamentally change”, and the speaker of the House dismissed even a modest climate plan as“the green dream or whatever”; in which the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an “existential threat to humanity” while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just move to Mars.

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From August this year

There’s no mystery. The Chesapeake Bay is getting warmer every year. I haven’t seen jellyfish in two years; Baby crabs eat the baby jellies. Bottom grasses, key habitats for crabs are disappearing fast. Non-native fish i.e. new crab predators have been introduced in feeder rivers and over harvesting isn’t helping. It’s the climate stupid.

Appears that many crabbers are giving up:

"Paulshock said many watermen are also retiring, some of them cashing in on high land prices instead of transferring their property to their children or other family members.

“They’re the farmers of the Chesapeake Bay, and the generational watermen are one of the biggest treasures of the Chesapeake Bay,” he said. “But we don’t have as many watermen as we had in the past — it hurts every aspect of the restaurant business, the crab houses, picking houses, the shucking houses.”

I can confirm that at least two crabbing operations have shut down in a place that I’m familiar with. One sold the property for development the other just sits there rotting, probably more a super fund site than future waterfront vacation homes. I suppose it will be under water soon enough.

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Champangne per brindare un incontro…

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Cross-posted in the misogyny thread:

Edited to add: @nick_warr pointed out that @BakaNeko posted this same article in this thread quite a while ago…oops! I guess the system didn’t catch it because the links were to the same article in two different languages.

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Crosspost in crypto

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So to adjust for corporations:

  • breed fewer cows
  • make fewer airplanes / extract less oil
  • subsidize home energy efficiency instead of subsidizing oil companies!
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Great start! :+1: :crossed_fingers:

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CNN left out “hold your breath to reduce CO2 emissions”.

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Onebox?

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Ford says its planning to double production of its upcoming electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, to 150,000 vehicles per year by 2023. The news comes as the automaker prepares to start making and shipping its new EV in the first half of 2022.

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So, Gaia Theory suggests that planet Earth is effectively a sentient being with systems to defend itself. Never paid much mind to it. However, this does make one think, are we being “evolved” to be more planet friendly by Gaia?

In the United States, the condition is most often caused by a Lone Star tick bite. The bite transmits a sugar molecule called alpha-gal into the person’s body. In some people, this triggers an immune system reaction that later produces mild to severe allergic reactions to red meat, such as beef, pork or lamb, or other mammal products.

(I still don’t buy the theory, because Nature has much more effective, rapidly acting and certain options to rid itself of a certain pestilential ape than this, but it does cause one to wonder.)

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Inspired by “Darren Arenovsky’s brilliant climate-allegory film Mother.”

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“ The curtain just lifted on one of the many mysteries surrounding Bitcoin: How much is being produced using super-dirty coal in Kazakhstan. We knew that the Eurasian nation was a major destination for miners, and that the refugees recently expelled from China were flocking there. Still, it was difficult to establish how much of all the world’s coins Kazakhstan was minting. Clouding the picture was the government’s recent moves to severely restrict the mining boom that was plaguing its cities via rolling blackouts.

On January 5, the world got at least a rough answer. Violent protests erupted over the soaring cost of fuel and the nation’s autocratic rule. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev sacked his government and declared a state of emergency. Apparently on his orders, the largest telecom provider shuttered the internet to interrupt communications among the opposition’s ranks. When the web goes down, miners can’t communicate with the Bitcoin network. The “hash rate,” the random codes that win fresh awards of Bitcoin, collapses. A few hours into the outage, Larry Cermak of the crypto news and research site The Block tweeted that a full 12% of Bitcoin’s worldwide computational power had vanished. His data showed sharp declines for a number of producers with operations in Kazakhstan. The hash rates for AntPool, Poolin and Binance Pool all fell between 12% and 16%.”

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