North Carolinaâs coastlines are an inescapable reminder of the climate crisis as they face accelerating sea level rise, intensifying storms, and increasing coastal erosion. These environmental changes threaten not only invaluable ecosystems, but also the cultural heritage and economic stability of communities along the shores of North and South Carolina.
Zanetta Sirleaf
Climate Crisis and Carolina Coastlines: A Looming Threat to Communities and Ecosystems (Carolina Forward)
This was an interesting video from Sarah Taber. I had never heard of screwworm before or how they were eradicated within the United States and the rest of North America.
Screwworm: MAGA is bringing back flesh-eating maggots đŚ (Farm to Taber – YouTube)
Cochliomyia hominivorax (Wikipedia)
Proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency whose weather and climate research touches almost every facet of American life, are targeting a 57-year-old partnership between Princeton University and the U.S. government that produces what many consider the worldâs most advanced climate modeling and forecasting systems. NOAAâs work extends deep into the heart of the American economy â businesses use it to navigate risk and find opportunity â and it undergirds both American defense and geopolitical planning. The possible elimination of the lab, called the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in concert with potential cuts to other NOAA operations, threatens irreparable harm not only to global understanding of climate change and long-range scenarios for the planet but to the countryâs safety, competitiveness and national security.
Abrahm Lustgarten
White House Proposal Could Gut Climate Modeling the World Depends On (ProPublica)
This first article is from just shy of a decade ago in 2016:
In perhaps the most eagerly anticipated aerospace announcement of the year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed his grand plan for establishing a human settlement on Mars.
In short, Musk thinks itâs possible to begin shuttling thousands of people between Earth and our smaller, redder neighbor sometime within the next decade or so. And not too long after thatâperhaps 40 or a hundred years later, Mars could be home to a self-sustaining colony of a million people.
…
Though he admitted his exact timeline is fuzzy, Musk thinks itâs possible humans could begin flying to Mars by the mid-2020s.
Nadia Drake
Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s (National Geographic)
Was there ever any chance for Elon Musk to achieve that goal? Here are two more recent articles that claim he never had a chance. The first addresses engineering problems with SpaceX’s Starship. The second looks at the feasibility of anyone actually living on Mars.
This is why Starship, in my opinion, is just one massive con.
That is the real reason why Starship was doomed to fail from the beginning. Itâs not trying to revolutionise the space industry; if it were, its concept, design, and testing plan would be totally different. Instead, the entire project is optimised to fleece as much money from the US taxpayer as possible, and as such, that is all it will ever do.
Will Lockett
Starship Was Doomed From The Beginning (Planet Earth & Beyond)
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
Albert Burneko
Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars (Defector)
Climate Reanalyzer is a site by the Climate Change Institute and the University of Maine that provides visualizations for weather forecasts and climate trends. For climate change, it makes it easy to check historical data on air and sea temperatures as well as sea ice at the poles.
We do absolutely know what we need to to to fight the climate crisis: Reduce carbon emissions radically. Which we have known for decades (I was taught about the âgreenhouse effectâ in motherfucking school 30 years ago and my schools never have been especially avant-garde). We know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, stop eating as much meat, invest in cleaner energy sources and insulate houses, etc. We know.
But itâs inconvenient. The solutions we know, we have researched, we have tested, are annoying. They force us to change our lives, force us to rethink our social and economic structures (Oh who would have thought: An economic system based on limitless growth and consumption would lead to bad outcomes. Letâs start a research project!). And who wants to do all that?
JĂźrgen Geuter / tante
Innovation is a distraction (Smashing Frames)
It was in the midst of this cross-disciplinary ferment that it occurred to him that the people talking about ecology and the people talking about climate were talking about the same thing. It was an observation he apparently mused on for over fifty years before presenting it formally, in 2022, with two other scientists, Debra Peters of the USDA and Dev Niyogi, University of Texas. His early observation appears now as: âWhen scientists focus on the physics of the Earth system, it has traditionally been called climate. In contrast, when scientists focus on the biological aspect of the Earth system, it is called ecology.â
Rob Lewis
Are Ecology and Climate the Same Thing? (The Climate According to Life)
Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the science of recycled molecules.
Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis.
Not now. Maybe not ever.
Lisa Song
Selling a Mirage: The Delusion of Advanced Plastic Recycling Using Pyrolysis (ProPublica)
Scientists say this year is almost certain to take over the top spot as the hottest year. The global average temperature could potentially breach a key threshold, reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average. Countries have agreed to try to limit warming to below that level in order to avoid much more intense storms, rainfall and heat waves.
The record-setting build up of heat has surprised scientists, setting off a climatic whodunit.
Lauren Sommer
2023 was extremely hot. Then came 2024 (NPR)
After reading that, I stumbled upon this Ask NASA Climate article from a decade ago:
Last week NASA and NOAA announced that 2014 topped the list of hottest years ever recorded. Yikes!
Whatâs worse, the ten warmest years ever recorded have all occurred since 1998. Yikes again!
I fear this news story might turn into a blip that gets tons of attention and is then forgotten after a few days. But it’s a topic that deserves sustained attention.
Laura Faye Tenenbaum
The 10 warmest years: Not exactly forever ago (Ask NASA Climate)
The only year from that article’s list of the hottest years on record that is still in the top ten is 2014, and 2024 is going to knock it down to number 11. The 10 warmest years on the record are the most recent 10 years.
By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that whatâs most important is fulfilling âour potentialâ by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a âmoral excuseâ to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that Iâve come to see longtermism as an immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of âfuture value,â complete with its own âsecularised doctrine of salvation,â as the Future of Humanity Institute historian Thomas Moynihan approvingly writes in his book X-Risk. The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the Westâespecially the socioeconomic eliteâmakes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty, but you are actually a morally better personfor focusing instead on more important thingsârisk that could permanently destroy âour potentialâ as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life.
Ămile P. Torres
The Dangerous Ideas of âLongtermismâ and âExistential Riskâ (Current Affairs)
Scott Boehmer 