Tuesday, April 30, 2024

                      CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER

IS THIS THE END OF DAYS?
Mark  extending palm for payola
 at paris CLIMATE HUSTLE  DEBUT
A PRO-GEOENGINEERING editorial
in  the Washington post   has   
driven  MARK MORANO to embrace AL GORE as A comrade in arms with 
a  Climate depot   LINK  to  al's  2010  ANTI-GEOENGINEERING sermon on  THE  ELLEN  DEGENERES  SHOW : 





... Climate engineering scholars David Keith at the University of Chicago and Wake Smith at Yale think it would take no more than 15 souped-up Gulfstream jets to send up, say, 100,000 tons of sulfur per year into the lower stratosphere to block solar rays, at an annual cost of some $500 million. This could happen in as little as five years
 

 

Monday, April 29, 2024

                    THAT SOUNDS VAGUELY FAMILIAR!




Co-production of knowledge can help us address climate challenges more effectively by integrating traditional ecological knowledge with scientific expertise… 
Cooperative relationships between Indigenous peoples and scientific communities is among the fastest methods for responding to climate change. 

We further examine what equitable co-production of knowledge looks like through… the committee on Co-Production of Environmental Knowledge, Methods, and Approaches.

This recalls the ice-breaking 2019 anthropology manifesto: 

GLACIERS, GENDER and SCIENCE: 

A FEMINIST GLACIOLOGY FRAMEWORK FOR GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE RESEARCH 

Mark Carey, Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change… indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive… science and knowledge have historically been linked to imperial and hegemonic capitalist agendas…

if the intersecting forces of colonialism, neoliberalism, and patriarchy have historically silenced and marginalized certain ways of knowing…then feminist glaciology - drawing from feminist political ecology and feminist postcolonial science studies - seeks to expose those more-than-science voices and offer a diversity of representations of cryoscapes. 



‘The glaciers these women speak of’, explains Cruikshank (2005: 51–3), ‘ are willful, capricious, easily excited by human intemperance, but equally placated by quick-witted human responses.

 

Proper behavior is deferential. I was warned, for instance, about firm taboos against ‘‘cooking with grease’’ near glaciers that are offended by such smells. . . . Cooked food, especially fat, might grow into a glacier overnight if improperly handled."


--Cruikshank J            Do Glaciers Listen? 

Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2005

Cruikshank J    Are glaciers ‘good to think with’? 

Recognising indigenous environmental knowledge. Anthropological Forum 22: 239–250. 2012



Wednesday, April 24, 2024

DID SPACE ALIENS EAT HIS SCIENCE HOMEWORK?

On April 19, Tucker Carlson informed Joe Rogan that aliens good and bad are supernatural entities that transgress:


'the laws of nature as we understand  them”


He warned Rogan that killer UFO’s  are plunging in and out of the Seven Seas at will, tearing around: 

“at 500 knots as measured by sonar, much faster than any object can actually go.” 

Tuck reassured Rogan his views were based not on the investigations of the quack journalist who sold Walter Cronkite on the reality of the Pyramids of Mars, but those of well-credentialed Stanford immunologist Gary Nolan M.D., 


who though lacking Earthly experience in materials science or engineering, has re-invented himself as the premier authority on "alien materials" which are scientifically defined as materials neither he or Tuck have ever seen before.


Tuck went on to add:

"There is a spiritual component here for sure. People will worship A.I. as a god. A.I., Ted Kaczynski was likely right, will get away from us. We will be controlled by the thing that we made …


We have a moral obligation to murder it immediately, and since it’s not alive we don’t need to feel bad about that…”


TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

The Wegener Medal has been awarded to Stefan Ramsdorf. Here he reports on the state of the real, as opposed to the Hollywood Atlantic Meridonla Overtunring Circulation has been doing and what Argo submersibles have learned in the course of cruisng more than 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

 

Potsdam

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

THE END OF THE WORLD ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

                           
           HISTORY IS FULL OF PROPHETS OF DOOM WHO FAIL TO DELIVER.
MaNY are still banking the residuals and scripting the remakes 
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PLIOCENE BLUE ICE BUBBLE AIR IS UNDER 300 PPM CO2

 Small pieces of ice core sitting on the surface at the Allan Hills Blue Ice Area, Antarctica.om an ancient warm climate.JULIA MARKS PETERSON

SCIENCE  24 APRIL 2024  Goudschmit conference report

VIENNA—Samples of eerie blue glacial ice from Antarctica are a staggering 6 million years old, scientists announced last week, doubling the previous record for Earth’s oldest ice. The ice opens a new window on Earth’s ancient climate—one that isn’t exactly what scientists expected.

Bubbles in the ice trap air from the Pliocene epoch, a time before the ice ages when the planet was several degrees warmer than today and carbon dioxide (CO2levels may have been just as high as they are now. But an initial analysis of the bubbles suggests CO2 levels were rather low in the late Pliocene and only sank slightly between 2.7 million and 1 million years ago as the Pliocene ended, the ice ages began, and Earth headed toward a dramatic climate shift that caused ice ages to grow longer and deeper. 

The results are preliminary, stresses Ed Brook, a geochemist at Oregon State University (OSU) and leader of the U.S. Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), which presented the discovery last week here in multiple talks at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. But if even a tiny drop in CO2can kick off a major climate change, Brook adds, “you know, we probably care about that.” 

Finding ice this old is fantastic,” says Eric Wolff, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Cambridge who wasn’t involved in the work... Wolff adds. “Nothing’s quite as direct as actually taking a bubble, snapping it open, and putting it straight into a mass spectrometer.”... 

To date the ice, Sarah Shackleton, a paleoclimatologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and colleagues at Princeton University analyzed the argon isotopes contained in its air bubbles. But the technique consumes a lot of the ice, leaving little of a standard 8-centimeter core left over for other analyses of the same ice layer. For now, the team has only drilled small cores of the 6-million-year-old ice, so its age is all they know, Brook says. They’re heading back to Antarctica next austral summer to retrieve larger samples.

But last season, Brook and his colleagues did manage to drill jumbo-size cores of ice as old as 3 million years. These cores, as wide as a dinner plate, yielded hundreds of samples of ancient air—including the first ever from the Pliocene, which ended about 2.6 million years ago with the start of the ice ages

Scientists think high levels of CO2 were responsible for the Pliocene’s warmth. Proxy data from sediment cores, such as the chemical compositions of the shells of tiny marine algae and plant leaf waxes, suggest CO2 was probably about as high as today’s unnaturally elevated level, 425 parts per million (ppm). But not one blue ice sample older than 1 million years exceeded 300 ppm, says Julia Marks Peterson, a paleoclimatologist at OSU who performed the greenhouse gas analysis.

The greenhouse gas data also raise questions about a mysterious climate shift that began about 1.2 million years ago. At this time, something caused the ice ages to grow longer and more intense, stretching out from mild 40,000-year cycles to deeper 100,000-year cycles. The leading theory for this flip is that CO2levels dropped, allowing ice sheets to grow too thick to melt away on a 40,000-year cycle. A new climate record from clues preserved in sediment cores, reported in February, supports that picture. But the snapshots across the transition found in the blue ice suggest CO2 levels held steady between about 220 ppm and 250 ppm. “We don’t see much change in CO2,” Marks Peterson says. “That doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. But it might be smaller than we expected.” 


Sunday, April 21, 2024

         ALBANIA PROMISES NET-ZERO ART BY EARTH DAY 2025

Sailing to Venice for the Biennale?   Put in to Putin's favorite cruising ground and check out the Heads of Heads Of State scene in  Albania's contemporary art capital, Fushë-Krujë!

Wonders await along the Côte Concrèt of Nato's 28th nation! the pillbox studded cultured pearl of the Adriatic hosts monumental cat paintings by Xhorxh H. Busj
in a venue overlooked by a colossal bronze of the former President on a plinth  formerly occupied by heroic statues of  Fearless Peoples Republic of Sqip Leader 
Enver Hoxa, and his predecessor King Zog .

Albania's Illyrian Coast  has sucked tourists ashore like Charybdis by turning a phalanx of iron-clad coastal bunkers into a pantheon of bronze colossi honoring  both Chief Executives and Vice-Presidential Chiefs Of Staff like  Agnew mentor Artur Smër, Loyal Cheney lieutenant Skotor Libbë and Dan Quayle Brain Trust head Vlym Xristol 
The Post-Palladian architecture of this  Albanian New Atlantis eclipses even Skagway & Atlantic City, drawing National Review, New Republic and Nation seminar cruise patrons  to admire the  ancestral home of John Belushi,  Mother Teresa International Airport, and Fushë-Krujë where Bush's whirlwind Balkans tour  ended in 2007

While crushing revisionist rumors that bronze colossus of Bush celebrates NATO ridding Albanians of Kosovo or Kosovo of Albanians, Fushë-Krujënes admit masterpiece was cast ex voto in apology for local fans removing wristwatch from Presidential wrist as  he worked  welcoming crowd in 2007.



Jeremy Grantham: Bubbles, AI, Climate Change, Population Growth

 


q

THERE IS ALWAYS BUSINESS IN GREAT WATERS

 

 On  January 9 the BBC reported on the plastic nurdle crisis , as a spill  lashed the Iberian coast with  the force of a thousand pool noodles 

"More than 1,000 sacks of pellets  known as nurdles ... have fallen from the Liberian flagged freighter Toconao, some 50 miles west of VigoThe tiny plastic balls used to make water bottles ... are less than 5mm wide, making cleaning up extremely difficult. Volunteers… combing through sand and sieving water to find the plastic pellets... accused Spain's Socialist-led national government of failing to inform local authorities. The crisis is reminiscent of Spain's worst ever… "
While the BBC valiantly strove to persuade viewers that  pellets EU approved for food container  must be as bad as a crude oil spill, an article entitled 

The water footprint of tourism in Spain

in the flagship journal of plastic bottle & spork  studies :
Tourism Management

Saturday, April 20, 2024

 THE DELUGE : GRETA AVANT ET STEVE APRES

A Planetary Crisis  Awaits the Next President

Donald Trump is giving two thumbs up while standing on an iceberg.
                   THE LATEST NY TIMES SCREED ON DEATH BY CLIMATE COMES
                                  FROM  STEPHEN KING ENDORSED NOVELIST WHO HAS NO FEAR OF BIDEN'S MULTI-TRILLION ALTERNATIVE ENERGY TAX CREDIT MUTATING INTO A POSTERITY ENSLAVING NATIONAL DEBT !

HERE  IS MARKLEY'S  WIRED  PODCAST CONFESSION :

Gideon Lichfield: So, in the book, one of the most interesting things that happens politically is that a schism emerges within conservatism, even as there's this increasing climate denialism as a feature of the right. There is also a conservative president who's elected on a green platform. In the book, the climate activists help bring about that schism by crossing political divides and appealing to Republicans. Do you see any sign of that happening in our real world today?

Stephen Markley: I've long seen those signs. There's a former congressman named Bob Inglis who I think deserves way more credit than he ever gets for being a sort of tireless advocate for climate. He lost in the Tea Party wave back in 2010 and got absolutely hammered because he was like, “Yeah, I believe the science, and I think we should do something about this crisis.” After he was voted out, he spent his entire life basically talking to all the people the climate movement would never talk to. Going on conservative talk shows, going on the radio, just sort of endlessly humping that Sisyphean boulder up the hill. And I do think—and I get these emails and comments from people—that there are more, especially young Republicans and young conservatives who don't have their heads buried in the sand on this, but they also operate within an ecosystem where the mouthpieces and the organs of right-wing politics are so loud and so vociferous, it's really hard for those people to gain purchase. But I still think as people's economic interests become more tied to the energy transition, that is going to begin to change—it's just a matter of how fast it changes.

Gideon Lichfield: One of the central characters in the book is Kate Morris, this climate activist who is instrumental in helping part of the right accept the green agenda. How important is it, do you think, to have this figurehead for the climate movement? Other than Greta Thunberg there isn't really that kind of figure at the moment. Do you think we need someone like that in order to push the climate fight forward?

Stephen Markley: I've long seen those signs. There's a former congressman named Bob Inglis who I think deserves way more credit than he ever gets for being a sort of tireless advocate for climate. He lost in the Tea Party wave back in 2010 and got absolutely hammered because he was like, “Yeah, I believe the science, and I think we should do something about this crisis.” After he was voted out, he spent his entire life basically talking to all the people the climate movement would never talk to. Going on conservative talk shows, going on the radio, just sort of endlessly humping that Sisyphean boulder up the hill. And I do think—and I get these emails and comments from people—that there are more, especially young Republicans and young conservatives who don't have their heads buried in the sand on this, but they also operate within an ecosystem where the mouthpieces and the organs of right-wing politics are so loud and so vociferous, it's really hard for those people to gain purchase. But I still think as people's economic interests become more tied to the energy transition, that is going to begin to change—it's just a matter of how fast it changes.

Gideon Lichfield: One of the central characters in the book is Kate Morris, this climate activist who is instrumental in helping part of the right accept the green agenda. How important is it, do you think, to have this figurehead for the climate movement? Other than Greta Thunberg there isn't really that kind of figure at the moment. Do you think we need someone like that in order to push the climate fight forward?

Friday, April 19, 2024

              FROM PALE BLUE DOT TO BIZARRE BLUE DROP

 Some centuries ago a planetary scientist by the name of Newton took time off from calculating orbits and wrote an optics primer with a chapter on why some things are highly refractive and others not. As the most refractive liquids at his disposal, olive and clove oil, could be burnt to soot, he correctly surmised that the most refractive solid he knew of might be carbonaceous too, and called diamond : "an unctuous substance much coagulated." 

While CO2 gets all the advertising these days it's important to recall that gases in general are refractive too, so planetary optics vary a lot.  Carl Sagan deserves credit for discovering that Mars thin ring of atmosphere can concentrate starlight onto a caustic curve at a focal length sometimes approximating the red planet's distance from the Earth, turning its atmosphere into a telescope of sorts. 

WEBB WAS IN FOCUS, TITAN'S ATMOSPHERE NOT SO MUCH, AND THE OIL SPILL ON THAT EARTHRISE IS ACTUALLY THE MOON'S SHADOW


The Webb Telescope made a name for itself by finding dozens of galaxies that act as gravity lenses that focus dim and distant objects into brighter Einstein Rings. Now it has turned its golden eye towards Saturn, and what may be the solar system's most refractive satellite atmosphere. The cold, dense, hydrocarbon saturated nitrogen surrounding Titan gives it a climate akin to the head space of a LNG tank. The temperature & pressure are close to the triple point of methane and ethane rain falls into hydrocarbon lakes and seas. In this atmosphere the velocity of light is anything but c . The refraction and color dispersion  of the 5% methane atmosphere  may warp wide angle views from orbit like a downmarket steampunk camera lens . Stargazing on Titan may be problematic or  headache inducing, as the stars ,inconstant in their courses,  may  part company as they approach the lens-like horizon, and the sun may rise as a blur. There's no mistaking this  bizarre blue drop for a pale blue dot.

Webb has imaged this truly alien sky in the nick of time: this pale blue dot's Voyager image shrunk below the one pixel mark years ago- nothing to see here folks, just move along: It's complicated:
But be of good courage Earthlings!  Things are looking better than ever to optics closer to home, be it a comet on the horns of the eclipsed sun:
Or Japan's 4K UHD reprise of  Apollo's Earthrise  featuring the Moon's transitory shadow: 

 COMNG SOON FROM SPRINGER PUBLISHING & THE AAAS:
    GLUTEN FREE NATURE AND CERTIFED VEGAN SCIENCE

THERE ARE NO REFERENCES TO FLOOD INSURANCE IN
                             THE ARABIAN NIGHTS


 

Sunday, April 14, 2024

                 LOST  WORLD  FOUNDATION ENDORSES  BIDEN
                           CLIMATE EMERGENCY DECLARATION 

Bloomberg Green
Climate Politics

White House Renews Internal Talks

 on Invoking Climate Emergency

  • Youth activists push Biden for move ahead of November election
  • Emergency proclamation could be used to halt exports, drilling






 

Saturday, April 13, 2024

SOIL CARBON UNDERESTIMATED BY >2 TRILLION TONNES

PALE CARBONATES UNDER DARK SOILS
Since agriculture & pastoralism began, human activity has altered   half the land area of the Earth. Besides visible landform and albedo changes, this disturbance has increased rates of soil alteration.  A report in Science reassesses how much inorganic carbon is vulnerable to such changes and how this impacts the global carbon cycle. 

Size, distribution, and vulnerability of the global soil inorganic carbon

SCISCIENCE
11 Apr 2024
Vol 384Issue 6692
pp. 233-239

Abstract

Global estimates of the size, distribution, and vulnerability of soil inorganic carbon (SIC) remain largely unquantified. By compiling 223,593 field-based measurements and developing machine-learning models, we report that global soils store 2305 ± 636 (±1 SD) billion tonnes of carbon as SIC over the top 2-meter depth. Under future scenarios, soil acidification associated with nitrogen additions to terrestrial ecosystems will reduce global SIC (0.3 meters) up to 23 billion tonnes of carbon over the next 30 years, with India and China being the most affected. Our synthesis of present-day land-water carbon inventories and inland-water carbonate chemistry reveals that at least 1.13 ± 0.33 billion tonnes of inorganic carbon is lost to inland-waters through soils annually, resulting in large but overlooked impacts on atmospheric and hydrospheric carbon dynamics.