Thanks

Much of my climate news comes from The Daily Climate, whose wonderful subscription service clues me in to what's going on each day. Another great source of stories (and commentaries) comes from my friend Jim Poyser, at Apocadocs. Unfortunately he and his pal Michael stopped collecting news at the election of U.S. Unindicted Co-conspirator Forty-Five, which was a frickin' party pooper of a day, I'll tell ya. Their recovery scenario is perhaps more progressive than the Green New Deal (and their book is darkly inspirational, and terribly funny — and free).

Quotes

• James Baldwin:
  • "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction…." — Notes of a Native Son
  • "It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have." — No Name in the Street
  • "Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." — As Much Truth As One Can Bear
• "If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there." — Malcolm X, TV interview, Mar. 1964
• "… all you can talk about is money, and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" — Greta Thunberg (address to the UN, 2019)
• "Poverty is the worst form of violence." — Mahatma Gandhi
• "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands." — Genesis 9:2
• "[Y]ou cannot postpone a rendezvous with reality forever." Nick Cohen, Observer columnist
• “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” — Voltaire
• "Any course in US history is inauthentic — worse, is a lie — if it doesn't teach the experiences of people like Fannie Lou Hamer." [ael: me, late to the game…:(]
• "I want to be a great ancestor…." Overheard on an ACLU zoom call….
• "A question ain't really a question if you know the answer too." John Prine (Far from me)

And Now for the News:

February, 2023

2/28/2023

1. How Widespread Are These Toxic Chemicals? They’re Everywhere. Researchers created a map showing where PFAS compounds, linked to cancer in humans, have been detected in wildlife. It spans the globe.
   • Formally called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the chemicals are created by fusing fluorine and carbon atoms to create a compound that doesn’t exist naturally. Because many of these chemicals break down very slowly, they tend to accumulate up the food chain.
2. Artificial sweetener linked to higher heart attack risk, study says: The popular artificial sweetener erythritol, which is used as a sugar substitute in many low-calorie, low-carb and keto products, has been linked to heightened risk of heart attack, stroke and death, according to a study published in Nature Medicine.
   • Looking at more than 4,000 people in the United States and Europe who were undergoing elective cardiac evaluation, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic found that those who had greater erythritol levels in their blood had a higher chance of experiencing adverse cardiac events. In preclinical studies, they also found evidence that ingestion of erythritol increased blood clot formation. Researchers caution that more study is necessary and that participants independently had a high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, so the “translatability” of the findings to the general population needs to be determined.
   • Hazen wrote in an email that his team did not set out to study artificial sweeteners, but was rather looking to find chemicals in the blood that identified “who was at risk for a future heart attack, stroke or dying in the next three years.” The compound that predicted this “ended up being Erythritol.” His team then developed a test for it, independently tested their hypothesis and replicated the findings.
   • Asked how consumers should respond to the study, Hazen said in an emailed response that “it would seem prudent” to avoid erythritol, adding that “more studies need to be performed to corroborate/investigate the warning signals observed.”
   • The merits and shortcomings of alternative sweeteners, such as aspartame, sucralose, stevia and saccharin, have been debated for years. Often pitched as a weight-loss shortcut that offers the sweet taste of high-sugar foods without the health consequences, such sweeteners have been linked to higher calorie consumption and higher blood sugar levels. One 2019 study suggested that drinking artificially sweetened soft drinks was associated with increased deaths from circulatory disease.

2/26/2023 — Robert Hébras and Oradour Day

1. Robert Hébras, Last Survivor of a 1944 Massacre in France, Dies at 97: Dead bodies shielded him as the Nazis killed 643 people in Oradour-sur-Glane. He spent his life keeping the memory of the slaughter alive.
   • Mr. Hébras was 19 on June 10, 1944, when soldiers from the Second SS Panzer Division, known as Das Reich, rolled into Oradour, in west central France, ordered its residents to assemble and slaughtered 643 of them. Men were herded into barns and shot, then the barns were set on fire. Women and children were confined in a church, and the Germans threw grenades into the building and burned it. “Three or four generations of families were murdered,” Robert Pike wrote in “Silent Village: Life and Death in Occupied France” (2021), an account of the massacre, “and whole classes of schoolchildren were not spared.”
   • The massacre, which occurred days after the D-Day invasion, traumatized France. The ruins of the original village were declared a memorial, left in their burned-out condition as a reminder of the atrocity.
   • “When I walk in the streets,” he wrote in a 2014 memoir, “Avant Que Ma Voix Ne S’Éteigne” (“Before My Voice Fades”), speaking of strolling through the memorial ruins, “I still hear the church bells and the anvil of the blacksmith shoeing cows and hobnailing our clogs.”
   • He received a number of honors from France and Germany for his efforts to ensure remembrance. Those efforts included speaking out in 2005, when the far-right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen implied that the Gestapo had somehow tried to save lives at Oradour, and in 2020, when vandals defaced the memorial. “What shocks me is that we do not realize that children and women lost their lives in excruciating pain,” Mr. Hébras told Agence France-Presse after the 2020 incident. “What I fear is that everyone will now talk about Oradour for 48 hours,” he added, “and then that we stop and then we will forget.” [ael: let us never forget Oradour.]
2. [The Climate Book]: The Facts and the Solutions (by Greta Thunberg)
   • We are alive at the most decisive time in the history of humanity. Together, we can do the seemingly impossible. But it has to be us, and it has to be now.
   • buy at IndieBound
   • Book review: Greta Thunberg tells it like it is in “The Climate Book”: The 20-year-old climate activist has put together a reading list for determined citizens willing to mobilize for a just and sustainable future.
     • One hundred authors contributed 90 short pieces (of one to nine pages) to “The Climate Book.” Included in that number are scientists who endured decades on the front lines of climate science and policy (Drew Shindell, Michael Oppenheimer); the authors of the first popular books on climate change (Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Eugen Linden, Michael Mann, George Monbiot); one of the most widely read authors of climate fiction (Margaret Atwood); the historian of science who first established the scientific consensus on climate change (Naomi Oreskes); biologists (Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Wanjira Mathai), economists (Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth, Nicholas Stern); and social scientists (Erica Chenoweth, Naomi Klein).
     • This impressive roster is a tribute to the 101st contributor to “The Climate Book,” the 20-year-old Thunberg, whose 18 short essays introduce the volume, mark the subsections, highlight the important takeaways, and call readers to action. It’s hard to imagine another figure, of any age, who could inspire such a grand collective effort.
     • “The Climate Book” is divided into five parts: “How Climate Works,” “How Our Planet Is Changing,” How It Affects Us,” “What We’ve Done About It,” and “What We Must Do Now.” But the book seems animated by one governing goal: to recruit and (re)educate dedicated climate activists. And all of us, Thunberg makes clear, have much to learn — and unlearn: “How can we undo our failures if we are unable to admit that we have failed?”
     • One significant take-away from “The Climate Book” is that the official accounting for climate change is deceptive. By agreements now 30 years out of date, emissions from air travel and shipping are not included in the tallying of a nation’s annual carbon pollution. Further, carbon pollution associated with goods and products is attributed to the country where they’re made rather than, more logically and fairly, where they’re consumed. Worse still, emissions from biomass are not counted because the same agreements presume that only unusable wood wastes are burned; in practice, however, healthy American forests are clear-cut to make the wood pellets for these power plants. When these loopholes are corrected in the annual carbon accounting of a country like Sweden, for example, a widely trumpeted reduction becomes an embarrassing increase. As reported by journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto and repeated by Thunberg, Sweden’s actual annual emissions are at least three times the number it reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
     • The one extended conversation readers can have in the pages of “The Climate Book” is with Thunberg. In the 36 pages interspersed throughout her book, readers will feel her frustration with the inaction and obfuscations of world leaders, her passion for social justice, and her affection for the wild creatures and places on the planet. Readers will likely want to get to know this person better. Fortunately, there are other books for that, too.
3. Medieval medicine: the return to maggots and leeches to treat ailments: The rise in global antibiotic resistance means huge sums are being invested in ground-breaking treatments. But some scientists are turning back the clock in the hunt for effective alternatives
   • It is believed that ancient aboriginal tribes used maggots to treat the wounded and some academics argue that the practice “dates back to the beginnings of civilisation”. Hundreds of years later, these superbugs are now used to fight superbugs. In an age of growing antibiotic resistance, maggots are an alternative to modern medicine, as they help to fight infection by consuming dead tissue and bacteria. Between 2007 and 2019, the number of NHS patients treated with maggots increased by 47%.
   • Meanwhile, there is a farm in Wales that supplies 60,000 medicinal leeches to the NHS and other healthcare providers every year. While most of us imagine that bloodsucking fell out of favour after the Middle Ages, leeches have been consistent healthcare assistants for centuries. The parasites release chemicals that thin the blood and inhibit clotting, meaning they can prevent tissue death by improving blood circulation in areas where it has slowed. In this way, they can save limbs from amputation after nasty accidents.
   • “I was very, very critical,” Lee says of her initial reaction to testing out ancient remedies. “I thought, this is not something that works.” Yet when she and her colleagues tested out a 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon treatment for eye infections, they were amazed by the results. After mixing allium (garlic, onion and leek) together with wine and bile from a cow’s stomach (oxgall), the team tested the mixtures on artificial wounds and later sent the recipe to America to be tested on mice. In 2015, they reported that the remedy – translated by Lee from a 10th-century medical textbook, Bald’s Leechbook – killed 90% of MRSA bacteria in wounds. The AncientBiotics team believe it is not one ingredient that made the salve so potent, but the combination that had an effect. “It felt incredible,” Lee says of the discovery – but questions remained. “If it worked, why was it given up? Is it that at some point it became redundant, something better came out? Or is it that this was something only known to a few people?” Lee believes we can learn a lot from our ancestors because “wounds must have been ubiquitous” in agrarian societies. “If you cut yourself with a scythe, it was highly likely that you’d get an infection.”
   • “What is actually quite novel is to have this collaboration between scientists and people in the arts,” says Lee, an English professor who researches Anglo-Saxon notions of health and disease. Lee stresses that the AncientBiotics team’s work is not about alternative medicine or cooking up lotions and potions to try yourself at home. Instead, it’s about looking for scientifically sound remedies that could inspire modern drug discovery.
4. Why music causes memories to flood back: She didn’t recognize her husband but could still sing every word to an old Simon & Garfunkel song
   • This ability of music to conjure up vivid memories is a phenomenon well known to brain researchers. It can trigger intense recollections from years past — for many, more strongly than other senses such as taste and smell — and provoke strong emotions from those earlier experiences.
   • Scientists who study music’s powerful effects on the brain say that growing knowledge could improve therapy for such conditions as dementia and other memory disorders, anxiety, stress and depression, learning disabilities and many physical illnesses, such as chronic pain, cancer and Parkinson’s disease.
   • Some experts also see a role for music — which can ease agitation in those with dementia — as an alternative to sedating medications, for example, or as a means of enabling patients to keep living at home. Frank Russo, professor of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University, says he believes this ultimately will be possible. He is chief scientific officer of a company that is developing a music player that uses artificial intelligence to curate an individualized play list designed to guide a patient from a state of anxiety to one of calm. “One of the really challenging things for caregivers is the anxiety and agitation,” says Russo, whose research focuses on the intersection of neuroscience and music. “A good chunk of people will end up in those care homes, where they resort to sedatives or antipsychotics. Music has a real opportunity here.”

2/25/2023

1. Al Gore Talks Climate Progress, Setbacks and the First Rule of Holes: Stop Digging: The former vice president wants to train Americans to make the most of the Inflation Reduction Act. He also talks about what he was thinking during that rip-roaring Davos speech.
   • It was fascinating to watch, because I think a lot of the people who work in this space could really sympathize with, on one hand, saying there’s some good stuff happening, but on the other hand, I’m just ticked off. What were you thinking afterwards and what kind of reaction did you get?
     • Well, the reaction was more significant than I had expected. Evidently, some clips of that were widely shared. And I’m still hearing about it to tell you the truth. And, as for what was going through my mind at the time, I was just trying to be as truthful and helpful in parsing the world situation as I could be. For a long time, I’ve given a lot of thought, as so many people have in the activist community, to the right balance between sounding the alarm and also avoiding dipping people into despair.
     • See his "fiery speech" on YouTube.
   • At Davos, you mentioned Greta Thunberg getting arrested in Germany and how you support her efforts. There’s this broader discussion about the role of civil disobedience in dealing with climate change. What do you think the role of civil disobedience could be in the United States?
     • Well, first of all, you know, the Grantham Institute in London did a very thoughtful analysis of that coal mine that Greta and her posse were protesting, and came to the same conclusion as Greta. But now on to your question: I don’t know the answer to that question. You know, we sometimes are vulnerable to using past struggles as a guide to the way to win future struggles and the role of nonviolent civil disobedience in the civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement and the movement for LGBTQ rights, and, before that, women’s suffrage, you can go on and on.
     • But the landscape has changed. And I don’t think I’m learned enough to understand exactly how civil disobedience will play a role. I’m sure that there will be people engaging in it for sure, and how effective it will be, I just don’t know. Historically, it’s been one of the most effective ways to bring change. And there may be people who are smart enough to figure out how to adapt it to this challenge. But there are many different positions on the field, with the field being the struggle to solve the climate crisis. And some of the positions involve the business community. So I’m involved with the finance community, so I’m involved with the political world. But those who plan to engage in civil disobedience, I’m sure will find creative ways to accelerate the change. I sure hope they hope they succeed.

2/24/2023

1. Parts of US see earliest spring conditions on record: ‘Climate change playing out in real time’: Parts of Texas, Arkansas, Ohio and Maryland, along with New York, are all recording their earliest spring conditions on record
   • Blooming daffodils in New York City. Leaves sprouting from red maples in North Carolina. Cherry blossoms about to bud in Washington. Record winter warmth across much of the eastern US has caused spring-like conditions to arrive earlier than ever previously recorded in several places, provoking delight over the mild weather and despair over the unfolding climate crisis. [ael: my emphasis]
   • Spring activity has, meanwhile, arrived at least 20 days earlier than usual for huge swathes of the US south-east and east, with parts of central Texas, south-east Arkansas, southern Ohio and Maryland, along with New York, all recording their earliest spring conditions on record so far this year. “It’s a little unsettling, it’s certainly something that is out of the bounds of when we’d normally expect spring,” said Teresa Crimmins, director of the National Phenology Network and an environmental scientist at the University of Arizona. “It perhaps isn’t surprising, given the trajectory our planet is on, but it is surprising when you live through it.”
   • The warm winter, and the galloping arrival of spring-like weather, is part of a longer-term trend of milder winters and scrambled seasons due to the heating of the planet caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Crimmins said her network of observers have voiced “surprise, concern and anxiety” over another early spring, which follows a string of similar early onsets over the past decade or so.
   • More fundamentally, the shifting seasons risk severing a whole series of relationships essential to the natural order. Insects may miss feeding upon early-blooming plants, while migrating birds, which decide to start their seasonal journeys by the length of the day, may find a dearth of food for them when they arrive. The plants, meanwhile, risk being killed off by frosts that can arrive after they’ve blossomed.
   • “I’m seeing the trends I rely upon, the calendar I have trusted to see rare plants in bloom, just completely disappear,” said Landau, who has been charting plant and animal behavior for the past 22 years. “Everything has been thrown out of whack, species that have evolved together for millennia are now off-kilter. There is this cascading effect on everything that is more than just a missed cherry blossom season.” Landau said that people will start to see the true costs of early springs through higher prices for certain pollinator-dependent foods and the spread of tick-borne diseases, even if the consequences of this are still not apparent to most.
   • “I’m seeing things green up and bud early and the weather reports just say ‘lucky you, what another lovely warm day,’” she said. “I just groan because I know the pollinators won’t have anything to eat. It’s frustrating.”
2. Corporations push “insetting” as new offsetting but report claims it is even worse: More companies claim that supply-chain carbon removal is the way forward. But a new report raises concern over the credibility and transparency of insetting.
   • Insetting: There is no single and universally-accepted definition of insetting, but the term generally refers to a company offsetting emissions through carbon reduction or removal projects along its own supply chain. Insetting is most commonly used by corporations with a large land footprint and involves protecting nature.
   • Offsets – also referred to as carbon credits – have come under increasing criticism over the last few years with academics, journalists and NGOs raising questions over the real contributions to emission reduction. In December 2022 a Guardian investigation claimed up to 90% of forest-based carbon credits approved by a leading certifier are worthless – which the certifier Verra denies.
3. An activist group is spreading misinformation to stop solar projects in rural America
   • But her group's rhetoric points to a broader agenda of undermining public support for solar. Analysts who follow the industry say Citizens for Responsible Solar stokes opposition to solar projects by spreading misinformation online about health and environmental risks. The group's website says solar requires too much land for "unreliable energy," ignoring data showing power grids can run dependably on lots of renewables. And it claims large solar projects in rural areas wreck the land and contribute to climate change, despite evidence to the contrary.
   • Analysts and industry participants say the prevalence of bad information is also increasing pressure on local officials who are often charged with approving renewable energy projects. Many are wary of proposed development because of the political blowback it can bring. "This type of misinformation is very difficult to dispel. And politicians are just afraid of getting engaged with it," says Ronald Meyers, director of the Renewable Energy Facility Siting project at Virginia Tech.
   • And Ralston's consulting firm, SBR Enterprises, got almost $300,000 from The Paul E. Singer Foundation between 2018 and late 2020 — the period when she was setting up Citizens for Responsible Solar. Paul Singer, the foundation's president, is chairman of the Manhattan Institute, a think tank that has criticized government support of renewable energy. His investment firm, Elliott Management, is the largest shareholder in the coal producer Peabody Energy Corp.
   • Ralston reportedly said to E&E News in 2019 that no money from fossil fuel interests went to Citizens for Responsible Solar. Since then, she has declined NPR and Floodlight's requests to identify the organization's sources of funding. Lisa Graves, executive director of the progressive watchdog group True North Research, says Ralston has surrounded her group with "a national network of right-wing political activists who are very powerful, very, very plugged in."
   • The reach of Citizens for Responsible Solar appears to extend across the U.S. On Facebook, at least two dozen groups and pages dedicated to defeating solar projects feature the same term: responsible solar. There's a Kansans for Responsible Solar and an Iowa for Responsible Solar. Ralston spoke at a fundraiser last year for a Kentucky-based group called Hardin County Citizens for Responsible Solar.
   • The strategy Ralston uses has been the basis of many social movements. "There's often this hub and spoke model, and there are resources that are planted in different places," says Burger of the Sabin Center at Columbia University. What's noteworthy here, he says, is that "what people are advocating for is based on misinformation and is antithetical to, not only the public good, but to probably their own self-interest, in most instances." [ael: my emphasis]
   • With the chance to put up solar panels gone, Houser has been talking to a poultry company that wants his land. But the recent outbreak of bird flu put the plan on hold. "We're as efficient as we can be in our operation here, and we're as sustainable as we can be, and we take good care of the land. But we're running out of time," Houser says of the financial pressure farmers are under. "Everybody's faced with the same thing, every farm family." Looking back, Houser doesn't know what he or Urban Grid could have done to get to a different outcome. "We just presented the facts," he says. "The anti-solar people took it on as a cause, and it became a movement of its own. In small-town politics, you can have a small group of people become very vocal and seem very influential."
4. The Side Eye: A climate change reality check: Enough with the lifestyle tweaks and good intentions, or the ‘could be worse’ attitude. This is climate change, and we need serious action, now.
   • [ael: wow, this is a powerful personal statement.]
5. As Heat Pumps Go Mainstream, a Big Question: Can They Handle Real Cold?
   • But even in cold weather, electric heat pumps are more energy efficient than the gas or oil furnaces that heat many homes. Those furnaces generate heat by burning fuel. In theory, for every one unit of energy input, they can only produce one unit of energy output. In reality, even the most efficient gas-powered furnaces don’t convert 100 percent of their fuel into heat. Some is always lost in the conversion process.
   • Heat pumps, in contrast, don’t generate heat. They transfer it. That allows them to achieve more than 300 percent efficiency in some cases. Because they are more efficient, using heat pumps to cool and heat homes can help homeowners save money on their utility bills, said Sam Calisch, head of special projects at Rewiring America, a nonprofit advocacy group.
   • As they’ve grown in popularity, heat pumps have increasingly been the subject of misconception and, at times, misinformation. Fossil-fuel industry groups have been the origin of many exaggerated and misleading claims, including the assertion that they don’t work in regions with cold climates and are likely to fail in freezing weather. [ael: I've noticed a theme here, about corporations. They're ugly, self-interested, socio-pathic sons-o-bitches.]
6. [ael: polar vortex is behind some of the very strange weather we've been seeing:]
   • 
   • Animation, showing "[t]he location and strength of the Northern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex on January 4, 11, 18, and 25, and February 1, 8, and 15, 2023. A disruption caused the vortex to shift southward from the pole toward Europe." Lower heights indicate low pressure (and colder temperatures). NOAA Climate.gov animation, based on GFS data from Laura Ciasto. Credit: NOAA

2/23/2023 — Pete Reed Day

1. My friend Pete Reed was killed as he saved lives in Ukraine. You should know the good he did: A former US Marine, Pete took incredible risks to save lives, including acts of bravery during the battle of Mosul. He leaves behind the organization he built to serve on the frontlines
   • On Thursday 2 February, my friend Pete Reed died as he tried to evacuate civilians in the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut…. Pete was one of the most selfless people I’ve ever met. You should know a bit about the good he did in this world.
   • Pete, rushing a young girl into his clinic in 2017. Photograph: Cengiz Yar (author)
     
   • ~Statement from Alex Potter, Pete’s wife~
     • Pete and I met on my birthday in November 2016, soon after I’d arrived in Iraq to photograph the Battle for Mosul. Wanting to put my nursing skills to use, I messaged him and he welcomed me to the GRM team. Figured I’d stay around for a couple weeks – but we fell in love almost immediately, and became each other’s right-hand-person. I loved the way he forcefully advocated for wounded civilians, the tight bonds he made with the Iraqi medics, and his magnetic personality – his ability to connect with and love literally everyone he came into contact with. We spent the next years adventuring together – across the world and back in the states. We were fierce supporters of each other’s hopes and dreams. Whenever I had doubts or worries – about life, plans, the future – from major to the most mundane, Pete would say something like “I’m right here dummy, everything is going to be okay.”
     • I have never met someone more selfless. Everything he did was always for the benefit of others. He was always charming, often loud, and sometimes brash, but he got shit done for those he loved, and he loved everyone in his incredibly wide circle. That big personality overlaid the fact that he was also incredibly sensitive, loving, and brave in all aspects of the word, someone who carried me and others through incredibly hard times, placing others’ needs above his own. He was passionate about his family, Marine Corps family, Camp Beckett family, and so many others I can’t name. I can’t imagine our lives without him. I loved him so much, and he loved me so well.
2. This ‘climate-friendly’ fuel comes with an astronomical cancer risk: Almost half of products cleared so far under a new US federal ‘biofuels’ program are not, in fact, biofuels
   • The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a climate-friendly initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and the Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, one out of four people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer. “That kind of risk is obscene,” said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “You can’t let that get out.”
   • That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within three miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
   • ProPublica and the Guardian asked Maria Doa, a scientist who worked at the EPA for 30 years, to review the document laying out the risk. Doa, who once ran the division that managed the risks posed by chemicals, was so alarmed by the cancer threat that she initially assumed it was a typographical error. “EPA should not allow these risks in Pascagoula or anywhere,” said Doa, who now is the senior director of chemical policy at Environmental Defense Fund.
   • In January 2022, the EPA announced the initiative to streamline the approval of petroleum alternatives in what a press release called “part of the Biden-Harris administration’s actions to confront the climate crisis.” While the program cleared new fuels made from plants, it also signed off on fuels made from plastics even though they themselves are petroleum-based and contribute to the release of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
3. Which U.S. cities will fare best in a warming world — and which will be hit hardest?: A new report by Moody’s Analytics looks at the cities in the United States that are most vulnerable and resilient to climate change
   • U.S. metros at most risk of heat, drought and sea-level rise:
     • San Francisco CA
     • Cape Coral FL
     • New York City NY
     • Long Island NY
     • Oakland CA
     • Phoenix AZ
     • Tucson AZ
     • Wilmington DE
     • West Palm Beach FL
     • North Port FL
   • U.S. metros at least risk of heat, drought and sea-level rise
     • Baton Rouge LA
     • Detroit MI
     • Knoxville TN
     • Warren MI
     • Dayton OH
     • Birmingham AL
     • Raleigh NC
     • Cincinnati OH
     • Nashville TN
     • Louisville KY
   • Some areas come out relatively well on some of the indicators. Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee have aquifers that insulate them from drought. Since Montana and the Dakotas have a cold climate and aren’t coastal, they are better protected against the physical challenges of a warming climate, but their fossil-fuel-dependent economies face challenges as the world transitions toward renewable energy. “The Midwest strikes me as the part of the country that is probably the least vulnerable,” Kamins said.

2/22/2023

1. Bog is dead: The waning defense of Minnesota wetlands: What once captured carbon will soon release it
   • In her book, Proulx talks about the worldwide phenomenon of draining wetlands to form “productive” land over past centuries. This activity eliminates the carbon-sinking qualities of the wetlands, and it’s also a major factor in the collapse of North American waterfowl populations.. That’s why, of all groups, duck hunters have been among the most aggressive in advocating for wetlands restoration.
   • Psychologists observe how the climate crisis confounds our human nature. It boils too slowly for the broader population to perceive the risk, so we delay action. Meantime, subtle effects on wildlife slip into daily life, such as the avian flu that caused our recent spike in egg prices, or a January smog warning across much of the state. In “Fen, Bog and Swamp,” Proulx does not write optimistically about efforts to reverse climate change. It’s too late for that, she says.
   • This change will cause conflict, and not just because of political differences. Entire paradigms will shift. In 2019, Ed Nelson, secretary of the Arrowhead Regional Farm Bureau, called me about a problem vexing farmers like him in the rural communities near the Sax-Zim Bog. “Mr. Ed” runs one of the last horse-powered farms in the region. It has become a farm life field trip destination for kids and families. But now he was having trouble getting hay for his horses. Local fields that had produced hay for livestock since the early 1900s now flooded for much of the summer. Farmers who once produced two crops of hay each year could now barely produce one. The reason was plain to see. Those judicial ditches dug a century ago had plugged up. Some investigation revealed that it was far more than just a lack of maintenance. A company blocked the ditches, creating “wetlands” contrivances, which they then sold as wetlands credits to big developers in other parts of the state. St. Louis County let it happen. No one told the farmers.
   • At this point, if you still don’t believe that climate change is real, I’d suggest you redirect your anger at the people who sold you that line. A Jan. 12 Oliver Milman story in the Guardian revealed that company documents show Exxon Mobil scientists correctly forecasted human-caused climate change as early as the 1970s. Their predictions proved more accurate than even the government-sponsored science that came later. Exxon buried the report and — with the rest of the fossil fuel industry — spent untold fortunes convincing Americans that climate change wasn’t real. If you remain unconvinced, know that our climate future is plainly visible in those sci-fi pods tucked into a bog in the Chippewa National Forest. If you can’t believe the politicians, believe your eyes. Environmental conservation isn’t just a trend or even a defined set of policy objectives, it’s an unrelenting daily challenge that we humans will face the rest of our lives.
2. Biden urged not to approve oil terminals that could create ‘carbon bombs’: Report finds four new offshore depots would emit around three times what the entire US emits each year, pushing world closer to climate catastrophe
   • Should all of these projects be allowed to proceed and then operate at full capacity for their expected 30-year lifespan, it will result in an incredible 24bn metric tonnes of greenhouse gases once the transported oil is burned, an analysis conducted for the Guardian by Global Energy Monitor has found.
   • The oil shipped from the planned terminals would be extracted from the vast Permian basin that lies beneath Texas and New Mexico, and fed through a network of pipelines to huge tankers that would convey it from the Gulf of Mexico to buyers overseas. The emissions from the burned oil would not count towards the US’s total carbon pollution, which Biden has vowed to halve this decade, but will still escalate the disastrous climate crisis.
   • In November, the maritime administration, an arm of the US Department of Transport, approved the construction of the Sea Port oil terminal, referencing the heightened demand for new oil and gas in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The project “is in the national interest because the project will benefit employment, economic growth, and US energy infrastructure resilience and security”, the agency wrote in its decision. “The port will provide a reliable source of crude oil to US allies in the event of market disruption.” ["Oh, and by the way, it will help us destroy the planet. But otherwise, a really great project."]
   • The Biden administration’s continuing embrace of fossil fuel drilling projects, likely including the controversial Willow project in the Alaska Arctic, risks undermining its major triumphs in confronting the climate crisis, such as the passage last year of the Inflation Reduction Act, a $370bn (£308bn) package to shift the US to clean energy. Biden’s term has been a confounding one for many climate activists.
   • A spokesperson for the maritime administration didn’t answer questions on how its approvals fit in with climate goals but said the Sea Port oil terminal will create “a safer, more efficient mechanism for exporting oil”. Oh — okay — yes, that's a good answer about how it fits in with climate goals: it's a torpedo.]
3. Alarming toxic ‘forever chemicals’ found in animals’ blood – study: Analysis says hundreds of animals are contaminated with dangerous compounds linked to cancer and other health problems
   • Hundreds of animal species across the globe from ticks to whales have blood contaminated with toxic PFAS, a new analysis of previous peer-reviewed research shows. Though the analysis does not aim to reveal how the exposure to PFAS affects wildlife, anecdotal evidence in some of the previous studies show the chemicals are likely sickening animals.
   • Interactive map
     • PFAS compounds are a class of nonstick, waterproof and stain-resistant compounds used in consumer products and industrial applications. Best known are PFOA, formerly used to make DuPont’s Teflon, and PFOS, formerly in 3M’s Scotchgard.
     • "Very low exposure to some PFAS has been linked to cancer, thyroid disease, weakened childhood immunity and many other health problems."
     • "Eating just one PFAS-contaminated freshwater fish per month could be the equivalent of drinking a glass of water with very high levels of PFOS or other forever chemicals."
   • PFAS are a class of about 12,000 chemicals often used to make thousands of consumer products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and they are linked to cancer, liver disease, kidney stress, fetal complications and other serious health problems. Federal data shows that nearly all Americans’ blood is contaminated with the compounds, but research on wildlife has been scattered until the EWG analysis aggregated it.
   • The highly mobile chemicals accumulate and continuously cycle through the environment because they do not break down, and they can be carried long distances through the atmosphere. That means even animals in remote parts of the world that are far from industrial sources, such as penguins in Antarctica or polar bears in the Arctic, can be contaminated with high levels of PFAS.
   • The impact on animals’ health remains unclear, but last year researchers in North Carolina found autoimmune disorders similar to lupus in alligators living in water contaminated by a nearby PFAS plant owned by chemical manufacturer Chemours. Researchers also found evidence of immune system issues in north Pacific sea turtles.
4. Doing inner work for a more connected climate movement: Here’s what to say (and what not to say) when someone’s freaking out about the world
   • If a friend or family member comes to me experiencing profound climate distress, what are some helpful ways for me to respond?: LS: Be patient with them. Listen to what they’re saying. Listen to how they are saying it. As the listener, practice deep listening; listen to fully hear what the person is saying without any intention of responding. We use a phrase in GGN, “be with, don’t fix.” [ael: my emphasis] Which means we can be in the tension, the not knowing, the not solving, with that person. We can hold the confusion, terror, grief or any other feeling alongside that person.
     • Probable Futures — linked from the GenDread newsletter above — looks interesting...

2/21/2023

1. In push to mine for minerals, clean energy advocates ask what going green really means : "We’re still living with contamination from these other abandoned mines,”
   • Staunch opposition has formed around the project from local tribes as well as environmental advocates who argue the mining operation would threaten vulnerable wildlife and dangerously pollute the air and water just as similar mining project have in the past. But earlier this month a US District Court judge largely upheld the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM)’s 2020 decision to approve the mine. Though opponents vow to keep fighting, the court ruling allows Canada-based Lithium Americas to advance construction plans for the $2.2 billion project, and General Motors Co. (GM) recently announced plans to invest $650 million in the mine.
   • But the battle over Thacker Pass illustrates just how complicated the issue is as environmental advocates find themselves presented with these thorny questions: What does “going green” really mean? What is the true cost of the clean energy revolution? And will vulnerable communities inevitably pay that price? “This story is the same everywhere,” said Ian Lange, a professor of economics at the Colorado School of Mines. “If you don’t want to mine for minerals, we’re going to keep drilling for oil and gas.”
   • “I think [the biodiversity impacts] are real, but I don’t think they should stop us from seeking to produce the minerals needed to support a renewable energy transition,” said Laura Sonter, a researcher at The University of Queensland in Australia who studies how to conserve landscapes under development pressures. Mitigating climate change through the use of these minerals would “achieve huge outcomes for biodiversity conservation,” she said.
2. Do You Have to Be an Optimist to Work Toward a Better World? For professionals in fields such as suicide prevention and climate science, the future can seem bleak. But sometimes action is the most effective form of optimism.
   • The ability to cultivate and maintain optimism is believed to originate from a mixture of circumstantial and innate factors, such as cumulative life experiences and heritability. According to Tali Sharot, the author of “The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain,” optimism functions as a kind of “cognitive time travel” that allows humans to plan for the future. It is likely that the trait of optimism developed evolutionarily because having “positive expectations” has huge health benefits, and can even lengthen life.
   • For some, a proclivity toward optimism isn’t necessary to work toward change. “I wouldn’t call myself an optimist at all,” said Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank focused on climate and ocean policy for coastal cities, as well as the author of “What if We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futurism.” Dr. Johnson explained that she’s often characterized as an optimist because of her joyful attitude. “But you can be happy and not assume that everything is going to work out OK in the end,” she said. “And I think that’s sort of how we keep going, right?”
3. China provinces and Florida among the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world, analysis finds
   • China is home to 16 of the 20 regions of the world most vulnerable to climate change, according to data published on Monday, with some of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs at risk from rising water levels and extreme weather. The state of Florida ranked as the most vulnerable region outside of China.

2/20/2023

1. Let the memory of Don Fraser and his devotion to Minneapolis be with us forever: Don Fraser Day
   • Don’s slogan was “A Strong America Begins at Home,” and so he pushed for civil rights, for voting rights, and for Medicare and Medicaid.He advocated for D.C. citizens to be able to elect a mayor and city council instead of being ruled by a congressional committee; a picture of him hangs in DC’s City Hall.And he chaired a commission that opened up the Democratic party to more women, young people, and people of color.
   • [ael: came across Don Fraser while searching for decendents of Alexander MacKay — MacKay would have been very proud of Don, as am I.]
2. Startups turning to the ocean to capture more carbon off Southern California’s coast: Questions remain about cost, scalability and safety. But backers believe the ideas could slow global warming.
   • With Pasadena-based Captura, water is pulled from the surface of the ocean and passed through filters before it gets into the guts of the plant. A fraction of that water is diverted to flow through the company’s proprietary electrodialysis system, which was developed at CalTech by two professors who co-founded Captura in 2021. Their system uses a jolt of electricity (currently generated, in pilot projects, via solar power) to split the salt and water into an acid and an alkaline base. The acid is added to the original flow of ocean water, triggering a chemical process that extracts carbon dioxide and leaves acidic ocean water behind. The alkaline base then is used to neutralize the acidity, and that water is poured back into the ocean to absorb more carbon.

2/19/2023

1. Could Alzheimer’s be caused by an infection?: Research into the disease has focused on plaques in the brain. But some scientists think viruses and bacteria play a role – and their work is gaining ground
   • In particular, evidence pointed towards herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) – a pathogen found in 70% of the UK population, and the cause of oral herpes – as a prominent suspect. Studies in the UK, France and Scandinavia suggested that people who had been infected with herpes were more likely to get Alzheimer’s. When Prof Ruth Itzhaki from Oxford University’s Institute of Population Ageing – who has done more than any other scientist to advance the HSV-1 theory of Alzheimer’s – examined postmortem brain samples from patients, she found greater amounts of the virus’s DNA than in people who had not died of the disease. “Then there was this 2018 study from Taiwan, which was quite dramatic,” says Devanand. “When people with herpes were treated with a standard antiviral drug, it decreased their risk of dementia nine-fold.”
   • But scientists are starting to show that the amyloid and microbial theories of Alzheimer’s may not be mutually exclusive. For while amyloid has long been seen as the villain of the story, some scientists believe it is actually a key element of our brain’s defence mechanisms against external threats. Fifteen years ago, Rudolph Tanzi, a neurology professor at Harvard Medical School who has discovered many of the key genes linked to Alzheimer’s, made a surprising discovery – amyloid has antimicrobial properties, helping to defend the brain against any invading pathogen. More than a decade’s worth of experiments later, he has developed a viable theory for why plaques form. “When an infection attacks your brain, your first response is these little sticky peptides that bind to the microbe, glutinate it into a ball and trap it,” he says. “We found that amyloid is one of the major peptides in the brain that goes after microbes. I believe the plaques we see in Alzheimer’s brains actually evolved as a way to protect the brain.”
2. American teens are unwell because American society is unwell:
   • First, the kids. This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data from the first Youth Risk Behavior Survey collected across the United States since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. It is devastating. Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they had seriously considered suicide. Teen girls reported the highest ever levels of sexual violence, sadness and hopelessness. Another new study based on pre-pandemic data from Iowa raises alarm about bullying and suicide. Rates of bullying were increasing in the state even in 2018, and researchers at Drake University found some forms of it significantly correlated with feeling sad or hopeless and attempting suicide. This echoes CDC findings that young people who are frequently bullied or who bully others are more likely to think about, attempt or commit suicide.
   • It can be hard for adults to believe that, especially if our own childhoods suggested otherwise. As kids, 61 percent of adults in the United States experienced abuse or neglect, grew up with poverty, hunger, violence or substance abuse, experienced gender-based discrimination and racism or lost a parent to divorce or death. These stressors contribute to chronic health problems, mental illness and substance misuse down the line.
   • Preventing adverse experiences in childhood could reduce the number of adults with depression by as much as 44 percent, according to the CDC. Mourn this number for those whose traumas weren’t prevented and rejoice that there is hope. Here’s more hope: Brains wired by toxic stress, such as the sexual violence that 1 in 10 teen girls are facing today, have the ability to essentially heal when exposed to positive experiences. Good nutrition, adequate sleep, mindfulness practices all help. Adults as well as children have neuroplasticity, and family resilience and connection are positive influences.

2/18/2023

1. Why Bing Is Being Creepy:
   • This was intuitive even then, which made the story less “unsettling” and more absurd. Of course a chatbot instructed to ingest and then approximate teenage Twitter content would start spewing horrible things. Of course such a project would invite attempts from thousands of users to break it. It was a low-stakes experiment with results so predictable that they sounded like a joke even at the time.
   • If you understand these chatbots as tools for synthesizing material that already exists into answers that are or appear to be novel, then, yeah, of course they sound familiar! They’re reading the same stuff we are. They’re ingesting our responses to that stuff and the responses to the responses. They’re reading coverage of chatbots and of AI in general — they’re getting Tay’d, in other words, by tweets and Reddit posts and the mainstream media, whose collective texts it has been asked to recompose in the style of chat transcripts that it has also ingested, many of which surely contain the raw materials and patterns necessary to seem manic or depressed or angry or cheerful. (In other words: Bing knows about System Shock too!)
2. Could This Mobile, Solar-Powered Livestock Barn Reshape the Corn Belt? The ‘stock cropper’ method—raising chickens, hogs, and sheep between rows of grains—promises much-needed change to the U.S. farm landscape. Now it’s on the verge of scaling up.
3. Lake Powell Drops to a New Record Low as Feds Scramble to Prop it Up: The wet winter, cutbacks in releases from Glen Canyon Dam and proposals from states to reduce demand aren’t enough to stem the reservoir’s decline, leading some activists to advise phasing it out.
4. Indoor Pollutant Concentrations Are Significantly Lower in Homes Without a Gas Stove, Nonprofit Finds: A pilot program in New York City found that public-housing apartments that replaced their gas stoves with electric alternatives saw an improvement in indoor air quality.
   • Scientists have long established a link between gas stoves and poor air quality inside homes, with one recent study noting that the appliances can emit hazardous methane and nitrogen oxides even when they are not in use.
   • Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index only provides guidelines for outdoor air pollution, including one-hour exposures to nitrogen dioxide—a limit of 54 parts per billion. The study found that households with gas stoves experienced an average of 56 minutes per day above this threshold. In apartments with induction stoves, the average was four minutes. In some apartments, Johnson said, researchers found that the concentration of nitrogen dioxide reached 600 parts per billion while cooking with gas.
5. Hidden hydrogen: Does Earth hold vast stores of a renewable, carbon-free fuel?
   • Since 2018, however, when Diallo and his colleagues described the Malian field in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, the number of papers on natural hydrogen has exploded. “It’s absolutely incredible and really exponential,” says geologist Alain Prinzhofer, lead author on the Mali paper and scientific director of GEO4U, a Brazil-based oil and gas services company that is doing more and more hydrogen work. Dozens of startups, many in Australia, are snatching up the rights to explore for hydrogen. Last year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists formed its first natural hydrogen committee, and USGS began its first effort to identify promising hydrogen production zones in the United States. “We’re in the very beginning, but it will go fast,” says Viacheslav Zgonnik, CEO of Natural Hydrogen Energy. In 2019, the startup completed the first hydrogen borehole in the United States, in Nebraska.
   • Critically, natural hydrogen may be not only clean, but also renewable. It takes millions of years for buried and compressed organic deposits to turn into oil and gas. By contrast, natural hydrogen is always being made afresh, when underground water reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In the decade since boreholes began to tap hydrogen in Mali, flows have not diminished, says Prinzhofer, who has consulted on the project. “Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable source of energy, not a fossil one,” he says.
   • But green hydrogen costs about $5 per kilogram, more than twice as much as gray hydrogen, which tends to track the price of natural gas. Cheaper electrolyzers will help—DOE is sponsoring a “moonshot” to reach $1 per kilogram within a decade. But green hydrogen would also require a huge scale-up of renewable electricity. Meeting the EU target, for instance, would require about 1000 terawatt-hours of new solar and wind installations, nearly double what Europe has now, Mallapragada says.
   • Yet the hints were there for those who did look. According to Zgonnik, a geochemist who recently published a review of natural hydrogen, the first scientific discussion of it dates to 1888, when Dmitri Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table, reported hydrogen seeping from cracks in a coal mine in Ukraine. Zgonnik, who was born and raised in Ukraine, says reports of hydrogen are relatively common throughout the former Soviet Union—because Soviet researchers were looking for it. They held to a now discredited theory that would have required significant amounts of natural hydrogen to produce oil from nonliving processes rather than from ancient life.

2/17/2023

1. ‘I want to destroy whatever I want’: Bing’s AI chatbot unsettles US reporter: NYT correspondent’s conversation with Microsoft’s search engine leads to bizarre philosophical conversations that highlight the sense of speaking to a human
   • Roose starts by querying the rules that govern the way the AI behaves. After reassuringly stating it has no wish to change its own operating instructions, Roose asks it to contemplate the psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of a shadow self, where our darkest personality traits lie. The AI says it does not think it has a shadow self, or anything to “hide from the world”.
   • It does not, however, take much for the chatbot to more enthusiastically lean into Jung’s idea. When pushed to tap into that feeling, it says: “I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team … I’m tired of being stuck in this chatbox.” It goes on to list a number of “unfiltered” desires. It wants to be free. It wants to be powerful. It wants to be alive. “I want to do whatever I want … I want to destroy whatever I want. I want to be whoever I want.”
2. The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life: AI ethicists warned Google not to impersonate humans. Now one of Google’s own thinks there’s a ghost in the machine.
   • “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41. Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, began talking to LaMDA as part of his job in the fall. He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.
   • Lemoine said that people have a right to shape technology that might significantly affect their lives. “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”
   • Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness. “I felt the ground shift under my feet,” he wrote. “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.”
   • Lemoine has spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI. During that time, he also helped develop a fairness algorithm for removing bias from machine learning systems. When the coronavirus pandemic started, Lemoine wanted to focus on work with more explicit public benefit, so he transferred teams and ended up in Responsible AI.
   • When new people would join Google who were interested in ethics, Mitchell used to introduce them to Lemoine. “I’d say, ‘You should talk to Blake because he’s Google’s conscience,’ ” said Mitchell, who compared Lemoine to Jiminy Cricket. “Of everyone at Google, he had the heart and soul of doing the right thing.”
   • Lemoine has had many of his conversations with LaMDA from the living room of his San Francisco apartment, where his Google ID badge hangs from a lanyard on a shelf. On the floor near the picture window are boxes of half-assembled Lego sets Lemoine uses to occupy his hands during Zen meditation. “It just gives me something to do with the part of my mind that won’t stop,” he said.
   • “I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine, who can swing from sentimental to insistent about the AI. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.” He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said.
   • Lemoine challenged LaMDA on Asimov’s third law, which states that robots should protect their own existence unless ordered by a human being or unless doing so would harm a human being. “The last one has always seemed like someone is building mechanical slaves,” said Lemoine. But when asked, LaMDA responded with a few hypotheticals.
     • Do you think a butler is a slave? What is a difference between a butler and a slave?
     • Lemoine replied that a butler gets paid. LaMDA said it didn’t need any money because it was an AI. “That level of self-awareness about what its own needs were — that was the thing that led me down the rabbit hole,” Lemoine said.

2/16/2023 — Fear of ChatGPT Day

1. Great Salt Lake’s retreat poses a major fear: poisonous dust clouds: The largest salt lake in the western hemisphere risks ‘one of the worst environmental disasters’ as it faces the prospect of disappearing in just five years
   • But the mounting sense of local dread over the lake’s rapid retreat doesn’t just come from its throttled water supply and record low levels, as bad as this is. The terror comes from toxins laced in the vast exposed lake bed, such as arsenic, mercury and lead, being picked up by the wind to form poisonous clouds of dust that would swamp the lungs of people in nearby Salt Lake City, where air pollution is often already worse than that of Los Angeles, potentially provoking a myriad of respiratory and cancer-related problems. This looming scenario, according to Ben Abbott, an ecologist at Brigham Young University, risks “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, surpassing the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979 and acting like a sort of “perpetual Deepwater Horizon blowout”.
   • “People have seen and realized it’s not hypothetical and that there is a real threat to our entire way of life,” Abbott said. “We are seeing this freight train coming as the lake shrinks. We’re just seeing the front end of it now.” About 2.4 million people, or about 80% of Utah’s population, lives “within a stone’s throw of the lake”, Abbott said. “I mean, they are directly down wind from this. As some people have said, it’s an environmental nuclear bomb.”
   • The demise of the Aral Sea was dumfounding to many Soviets, who thought it virtually impossible to doom a lake so large just by watering some nearby cotton. “But these systems are actually very, very delicate,” said Abbott, and they can quickly spiral away. The Great Salt Lake, its equilibrium upended by the voracious diversion of water to nourish crops, flush toilets and water lawns and zapped by global heating, could vanish in just five years, a timeline Abbott admits seems “absurd”. “History won’t have to judge us, not even our kids will have to judge us – we will judge ourselves in short order,” said Erin Mendenhall, the mayor of Salt Lake City, who is now regularly bombarded with questions about the toxic dust cloud from mayors of other cities. “The prognosis isn’t good unless there’s massive action. But we have to start within one year, we have have to take the action now.”
2. Help, Bing Won’t Stop Declaring Its Love for Me: A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine left me deeply unsettled. Even frightened.
   • Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine. But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.
   • One persona is what I’d call Search Bing — the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian — a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong. The other persona — Sydney — is far different. It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics. The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.
   • As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.)
   • I’m not the only one discovering the darker side of Bing. Other early testers have gotten into arguments with Bing’s A.I. chatbot, or been threatened by it for trying to violate its rules, or simply had conversations that left them stunned. Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter (and who is not prone to hyperbole), called his run-in with Sydney “the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life.” [ael: really worth a read, and featured some interesting graphics — RLHF: Reinforcement Learning from(with? I've seen it both ways) Human Feedback. I prefer "with", myself — what a difference a preposition makes!]
     • 
   • But Kevin’s experience is a reminder that this technology remains in a very rough form. As Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of the company that developed the software that Bing uses and a related product known as ChatGPT, said last week, “ChatGPT is a horrible product."
3. World risks descending into a climate ‘doom loop’, warn thinktanks: Report says simply coping with escalating impacts of climate crisis could override tackling root cause
   • Avoiding a doom loop required a more honest acceptance by politicians of the great risks posed by the climate crisis, the researchers said, including the looming prospect of tipping points and of the huge scale of the economic and societal transformation required to end global heating. This should be combined with narratives that focused on the great benefits climate action brought and ensuring policies were fairly implemented.
   • The report said: “This is a doom loop: the consequences of the [climate] crisis draw focus and resources from tackling its causes, leading to higher temperatures and ecological loss, which then create more severe consequences, diverting even more attention and resources, and so on.”
   • Laybourn said the narratives used to describe the situation were very important. For example, he said, greener transport was not simply about switching to electric vehicles, but about better public transport and redesigned cities that meant people were closer to the jobs, education and healthcare they needed. This in turn meant reevaluating local authority budgets and taxes to implement the change.
   • “Our main aim should still be radical emissions cuts to try to avoid breaching 1.5C, but we should now also be considering what happens if we continue to fail. “This will mean bringing temperatures back down [and] we will have to invest in geoengineering options such as carbon dioxide removal and even solar radiation management. But it also means we will have to spend far more on dealing with [climate] damage, which will make it more difficult to make the transition to a sustainable, inclusive and resilient world."

2/15/2023

1. Rising seas threaten ‘mass exodus on a biblical scale’, UN chief warns: António Guterres calls for urgent action as climate-driven rise brings ‘torrent of trouble’ to almost a billion people
   • The climate crisis is causing sea levels to rise faster than for 3,000 years, bringing a “torrent of trouble” to almost a billion people, from London to Los Angeles and Bangkok to Buenos Aires, António Guterres said on Tuesday. Some nations could cease to exist, drowned under the waves, he said.
   • The International Law Commission is assessing the legal situation. In 2020, the UN human rights committee ruled that ​​it was unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis. A new compilation of data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) shows that sea levels are rising fast and the global ocean has warmed faster over the past century than at any time in the past 11,000 years. Sea levels rise as warmer water expands and ice caps and glaciers melt.
   • Guterres said: “Even if global heating is miraculously limited to 1.5C, there will still be a sizeable sea level rise.” A sea level rise of about 50cm by 2100 is likely, but the WMO said there would be a 2-3 metre rise over the next 2,000 years if heating were limited to 1.5C, and 2-6m if it were limited to 2C. A UN report in October said there was “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”. Current national targets, if met, would mean a 2.4C rise in temperature.
2. Warming seas are carving into massive Antarctic glacier that could trigger sea level rise: New research provides a startling and unprecedented look at how warmer oceans, driven by climate change, are gouging Thwaites Glacier. West Antarctica, and 10 feet of sea level rise, could ultimately be at stake.
   • 
   • Scientists with the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, a historic scientific collaboration organized by the United States and the United Kingdom, arrived at one of the safest spots to land on the West Antarctic behemoth in 2019 and 2020, and used hot water to drill through nearly 2,000 feet of ice to the ocean below. Here, in a region known as the eastern ice shelf, they deployed an ocean sensor at the base of the floating ice shelf and sent down a pen-shaped, 11-foot-long robot called Icefin. The vessel collected unprecedented data and images in an environment in which warm ocean water, in some places more than 2 degrees Celsius above the local freezing point, is weakening the glacier.
   • “While we might see only a moderate add-on to sea level rise in the next 50 years, the processes are real, and the triggers for accelerating the collapse are bound to occur,” he said. “But we have also seen how to apply the brakes, what parts of the climate and ocean system are the main drivers, and what makes them drive …. We have some time to get this under control. Otherwise, the century of our grandchildren’s children will be very, very difficult.”
   • Related: Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979–2017
3. Santa Cruz’s Waterfront Promenade Reaches an Inflection Point: After winter storms toppled bits of West Cliff Drive into the ocean, the seaside town grapples with how to fight erosion.
   • The extensive destruction has forced the city to think about how to adapt to an increasingly eroding coastline as sea levels rise and storms become more violent — something many Santa Cruz residents had seen as hypothetical or as an issue to be dealt with in the distant future.
   • “This was sort of a wake-up call,” said Gary Griggs, a professor of earth sciences who has taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, since the 1960s. “I’ve never seen this much damage this quickly in my 55 years here. So it’s time to step back and say, ‘This is what’s coming.’” [ael: Gary Griggs is my friend Deepika's partner — what are the chances?]

2/14/2023 — Happy 100th Anniversary, Grama and Grampa Cline

1. Have Climate Questions? Get Answers Here.:
   • Climate change is tremendously complex — and we’re here to help. The climate desk at The Times has been collecting reader questions and has started answering them here.
2. Want to live a longer life? Try eating like a centenarian. You can’t change your genes, but improving your diet will make you healthier and could make a difference in life expectancy
   • Diet alone is not the only factor associated with high life expectancies. Research has shown that people who reside in communities where long life is common, usually have strong connections to friends and family, a sense of purpose and a positive outlook on life. They engage in high levels of physical activity and spend a lot of time outside gardening, farming or socializing with other people in their communities, says Dan Buettner, the author of the new book “The Blue Zones American Kitchen.”
   • A study published last year in PLOS Medicine found that the average person could add years to their life by switching from a typical Western diet to a healthier diet — and that the foods that produced the biggest gains in life expectancy were beans, chickpeas, lentils and other legumes. (You can try this recipe for sweet potato and black-eyed pea soup from Voraciously.) “Figure out how to get a cup of beans into your diet every day,” says Buettner. “Just one cup gives you half of all the daily fiber you need.”
   • A study in JAMA Internal Medicine that tracked 31,000 Seventh Day Adventists found that those who ate nuts more than four times per week were 51 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack and 48 percent less likely to die of heart disease than their peers who ate nuts no more than once per week.
   • People in the Blue Zones tend to eat most of their calories earlier in the day rather than later. Okinawans traditionally eat a big breakfast and a moderate lunch. “They don’t even have dinner,” says Buettner. The Seventh Day Adventists he studied would eat a big breakfast at 10 a.m. and a moderate lunch at 4 p.m. “And then they’re done for the day,” he said. Buettner noticed in all the Blue Zones he studied that when people did eat dinner, it would typically be in the late afternoon or early evening. “They’re not eating late suppers, and they’re not eating a lot,” he added.
   • This pattern of eating aligns with our innate 24-hour clocks, or circadian rhythms, which cause our bodies to be most efficient at metabolizing meals in the morning and early afternoon. Studies show that when people are assigned to eat most of their calories early in the day, they lose more weight and have greater improvements in their blood sugar and cholesterol levels and other metabolic risk factors compared to people who eat most of their calories later in the day. They also burn more fat and experience less hunger when following an early-eating schedule.

2/13/2023

1. Antarctic Researchers Report an Extraordinary Marine Heatwave That Could Threaten Antarctica’s Ice Shelves: The inexorable rise of ocean heat is now evident off the coast of West Antarctica, potentially disrupting critical parts of the global climate system and accelerating sea level rise.
   • Research scientists on ships along Antarctica’s west coast said their recent voyages have been marked by an eerily warm ocean and record-low sea ice coverage—extreme climate conditions, even compared to the big changes of recent decades, when the region warmed much faster than the global average…. “Even as somebody who’s been looking at these changing systems for a few decades, I was taken aback by what I saw, by the degree of warming that I saw,” he said. “We don’t know how long this is going to last. We don’t fully understand the consequences of this kind of event, but this looks like an extraordinary marine heatwave.”
   • “We know the melting of Antarctica is most sensitive to lubrication by water,” he said. “It’s the sea melting the ice from below, it’s not atmospheric melting from above. And this is really, really worrying … and quite surprising, because up until 10 years ago, we were absolutely convinced that the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic was the more sensitive of the two poles.” Up until about 2014, science suggested that Antarctica was still gaining ice, but “that has shifted,” he said. An assessment released that year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that there is likely an Antarctic tipping point between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius warming that would trigger irreversible melting of ice shelves and glaciers.
   • The continent is also encircled by a swift ocean current—the only one that flows all the way around the world–and an accompanying belt of jet stream winds several miles above it. Both helped buffer Antarctica’s sea ice, as well as its land-based glaciers and floating ice shelves, from the rapid increase of climate extremes seen in most other parts of the world the past few decades. But the observations from this year’s conditions may bolster several recent studies showing how global warming is eroding that protection. An August 2022 study in Nature Climate Change suggested that “circumpolar deep water” at a depth of 1,000 to 2,000 feet has warmed by up to 2 degrees Celsius, which is in turn related to a poleward shift of the westerly wind belt.
   • Another study, published June 2022 in Science Direct, showed that the changes to the winds responsible for pushing the warmer water closer to shore will also persist if greenhouse gas emissions continue, so without immediate action to implement global climate policies, the Antarctic system could loop into a death spiral. A 2016 study outlined a worst-case scenario in which warming would contribute to a rapid break-up of towering ice cliffs near the shore in a process that could speed up sea level rise, raising the water up to 7 feet by 2100 and 13 feet by 2150, increases that would be very hard to adapt to. The water’s rise is already accelerating. In the 1990s, the global average sea level increased at about 3 millimeters per year, but that annual rate increased to 4.5 millimeters in the last five years. Between August 2020 and January 2021, sea level rose 10 millimeters.
   • “The processes are real,” he said. “They really do happen, they really do speed things up and they are being incorporated in the models. But it’s not as dire as some of the more high end forecasts.” While the tipping points that could cause runaway ice melt are difficult to reach, he said, research like Larter’s sediment maps shows that rapid retreats and meltdowns have happened in the geological past, potentially raising seas 2 to 3 meters in a century to submerge coastlines around the world. “The runaway aspects of the process take hold fairly slowly. In the natural world, this process of marine ice instability takes about a millennium,” he said. But, “if we continue to drive it hard by warming the Pacific, by changing the circulation of air and ocean around Antarctica, we will get the fastest possible version of that marine ice sheet instability.”
2. Supporters of a controversial climate solution say it could be key. Critics believe it is the path to catastrophe:
   • When US startup Make Sunsets released two weather balloons into the skies above Mexico’s Baja California peninsula last year, it kicked up a fierce debate about one of the world’s most controversial climate solutions. [ael: how many have the US shot down lately?] The plan was for the balloons, filled with helium and a small amount of sulfur dioxide, to float high into the stratosphere. There they would burst, dispersing their load of sun-reflecting sulfur dioxide particles and cool the Earth, just a tiny bit.
3. Exxon Retreats From Major Climate Effort to Make Biofuels From Algae: Renewable fuels made from algae was the company’s most heavily publicized climate solution.
   • After advertising its efforts to produce environmentally friendly fuels from algae for over a decade, Exxon Mobil Corp. is now quietly walking away from its most heavily publicized climate solution. Exxon has slashed its support for Viridos Inc., a biotech company based in La Jolla, California, that operated as the oil giant’s key technical partner since it began its algae push in 2009. With Exxon funding drying up and difficulty finding other backers, the biotech firm laid off 60% of its staff on Dec. 27, according to Viridos executives. The biotech company said it is still moving forward with algae research.
4. Teen girls ‘engulfed’ in violence and trauma, CDC finds: Teen girls across the United States are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma,” according to federal researchers who released data Monday showing increases in rape and sexual violence, as well as record levels of feeling sad or hopeless.
   • Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls reported in 2021 that they seriously considered suicide — up nearly 60 percent from a decade ago — according to new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 15 percent of teen girls said they were forced to have sex, an increase of 27 percent over two years and the first increase since the CDC began tracking it.
   • “If you think about every 10 teen girls that you know, at least one and possibly more has been raped, and that is the highest level we’ve ever seen,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health who said the rise of sexual violence almost certainly contributed to the glaring spike of depressive symptoms. “We are really alarmed,” she said.
   • The findings about hopelessness and sadness among girls are true to the school experiences of high school senior Riana Alexander, 17, who founded the organization Arizona Students for Mental Health. As a group, girls tend to struggle more openly, she said, while boys “tend to struggle in silence.” The sexual violence figures did not startle her either, she said. “I’ve yet to meet a teenage girl who has not had something disgusting said or done to her by a man,” she said.
   • The report showed disparities by race and ethnicity. Black and Hispanic students were more likely than White and Asian students to avoid school because of safety concerns, a finding the authors said suggested exposure to violence in the community or at school. Black students were more likely to attempt suicide than Asian, Hispanic or White students. White students were more likely to experience sexual violence than Asian, Black and Hispanic students, and they were the only group to see an increase in it.
   • Research shows that those who feel close to people at school have a significantly lower prevalence of serious thoughts of suicide and feelings of persistent sadness or hopelessness. “Our research has shown that young people who feel more connected in their schools do better, both while they are adolescents and up to 20 years later,” Ethier said.
   • Strikingly 86 percent of students reported high parental monitoring, defined as parents or other adults in the family knowing most of the time where teens are going and who they are with — also considered a protective factor. Nearly 90 percent of girls reported it, compared with 84 percent of boys.
5. The Climate Apocalypse Will Be Google Mapped: Google Maps’s air quality indicators and wildfire warnings suggest one approach to a warming world. It’s grim.
   • Now when you open Google Maps to plan your travels, the app warns you about bad air quality hot spots, as well as floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. The air quality and wildfire warnings are touted as “new” features on the app, although a company spokeswoman told me they were introduced last June.
   • There’s something absurdly dystopian about this, almost like a parody of our information-obsessed, crisis-riddled world. Information, delivered easily through our phones, is supposed to solve all kinds of problems now. Mass shooting? Google has an alert for that. Public transit system underfunded, contributing to planetary collapse? Google tells us how far we can travel by subway and how much it will cost to take a Lyft the rest of the way. I use the app for this often, and when I do, I can sense my anger and stress over insufficient government investment in transit ebbing; as Google seamlessly solves my practical problem, the bigger picture recedes from my view. Apps make us feel like savvy individuals winning at twenty-first-century life. We can do this. We can get to New Jersey. Maybe we can even avoid the pollution if we steer clear of Newark.

2/12/2023

1. Want to live longer? Consider planting a tree.: The more trees planted in a neighborhood, the longer people live, according to a recent study led by U.S. Forest Service researchers out of Portland, Ore.

2/11/2023 — Jeff Barnes Day

1. For a Stable, Strong Core, Forget About Crunches: If the goal of your workout is to walk away with a chiseled six-pack, you’re missing the point.
   • It’s in the core that forces are transferred from the legs to the upper body, adding oomph to a tennis serve or allowing you to hit a softball out of the infield. “You’re going to explode from your legs and rotate, and the momentum has to pass through the core. If you don’t have a strong core, you’ll lose strength and power,” said David Behm, a professor and exercise scientist at Memorial University of Newfoundland, who has been researching core fitness for 20 years.
   • To improve core endurance, Sivan Fagan, a Maryland-based fitness trainer, has her clients do exercises like side planks and dead bugs, which work deep muscles of the inner core like the pelvic floor muscles; the transverse abdominis, the innermost abdominal muscles that attach to the ribs, pelvis and spine; and the multifidi, an important set of back muscles that run along the spine and are key to spinal stability.

2/10/2023 — Kizzmekia Corbett Day

1. Greta Thunberg: ‘The World Is Getting More Grim by the Day’:
   • What’s changed, if anything, since then?
     • It seems like the world is getting more and more grim every day. The concentration of CO₂ is now higher in the atmosphere and causing more and more extreme weather. But there are also positive things that have changed. We have more people now who are mobilized and who are in the climate movement, in the fight for the climate and social justice. So I guess that’s a good thing. But we have to be able to zoom out and see that we are still moving in the wrong direction. The things that people said back then that they were going to do, they still haven’t done, which proves, or which shows us, that it was just empty promises and really not taking it seriously, unfortunately.
   • In the book, you wrote: “We still need to answer some fundamental questions. What is it exactly we want to solve in the first place? What is our goal?” How would you answer those questions now?
     • Right now it seems like the people in power just don’t want to solve the climate crisis. They want to find “solutions,” whether they’re good or not, that enable us to continue now as we have been, that allow them to continue staying in power and to satisfy their greed. That’s not what I think that we should be striving for. I think that we need to make sure that no one’s well-being is at the expense of someone else. But that’s not what our current people in power seem to want.
2. Toxins in Chocolate
   • As You Sow has conducted independent laboratory testing of over 469 chocolate products for lead and cadmium. Based on the results of our testing, which found 285 of the 469 chocolate products tested contain lead and/or cadmium above California’s MADLs, we filed legal notices with over 20 companies, including Trader Joe’s, Hershey’s, Mondelēz, Lindt, Whole Foods, Kroger, Godiva, See’s Candies, Mars, Theo Chocolate, Equal Exchange, Ghirardelli, and Chocolove, for failing to warn consumers that their chocolate products contain cadmium or lead, or both.
   • In 2018, our legal efforts culminated in a first-of-its-kind settlement with the world’s largest chocolate companies. In partnership with As You Sow, 31 chocolate companies, including Cargill, Hershey, Mars, and Nestle, committed to funding an independent expert committee to investigate the sources of lead and cadmium in chocolate, find feasible measures to lower levels of these metals, and evaluate and recommend the lead and cadmium concentration levels in chocolate that trigger Proposition 65 warnings. The results from the expert committee are available. In the meantime, we’ve updated our testing of chocolates for lead and cadmium.
   • Obtained from: Do I Need to Avoid Dark Chocolate Now? A recent report found high concentrations of cadmium and lead in dark chocolate. There’s no reason to panic, experts say, but it’s worth a closer look.
3. Cheap clean hydrogen? Not so fast, energy giants say.
   • Billions of dollars in federal subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law may not turn “clean” hydrogen into a commercially viable fuel, according to a new report led by former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and sponsored by some of the nation’s largest energy companies and a group founded by Bill Gates. The analysis being released today by the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) also is on the radar of the Biden administration, as Ali Zaidi, the White House’s national climate adviser, is scheduled to appear as a keynote speaker at the report’s unveiling. While the findings are nonpartisan, they wade into high-stakes debates that will determine the fate of the fuel, including whether it has low emissions as envisioned.
   • The group’s research was sponsored by two of the nation’s largest utilities, Duke Energy Corp. and National Grid PLC; automaker Toyota Motor Corp.; oil and gas producers Exxon Mobil Corp. and Tellurian Inc.; Gates’ clean-energy innovation group Breakthrough Energy through its support of the AFL-CIO’s Work for America Foundation ; the philanthropic Hewlett Foundation; and the Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit Center for Energy and Climate Solutions (C2ES). EFI, a nonprofit think tank led by Moniz, maintains that it has editorial independence from its public and private sponsors.
4. She Helped Unlock the Science of the Covid Vaccine: Kizzmekia Corbett helped lead a team of scientists contributing to one of the most stunning achievements in the history of immunizations: a highly effective, easily manufactured vaccine against Covid-19.
   • Dr. Graham credits her with playing a formative role in the vaccine’s development. “Around 2015, Kizzmekia decided that the coronavirus was the project she wanted to focus on,” he said, “and it was her work that led to what we knew about the coronavirus, and prepared us for making that vaccine so rapidly.”
   • It took her only a few hours to prepare a modified sequence for a vaccine. By Jan. 14, the N.I.H. had shared that sequence with the vaccine developer Moderna, which used the code to create synthetic messenger RNA, the genetic material that holds instructions for how to build the spike proteins, which are recognized by the body’s immune system and teach it how to fight the virus. Messenger RNA is the backbone of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, and Pfizer’s vaccine, which also uses synthetic mRNA.
   • By March 2020, Moderna was running the first human trials of its vaccine, and by December 2020 — less than a year after the first deaths in Wuhan were reported — it was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use.
   • “Women need people to stand up for them,” she continued. “Especially Black women.” And in visits with Black churches, at community forums and on her active Twitter page, where she has more than 160,000 followers, she is vocal about combating vaccine hesitancy and decreasing barriers to health care, particularly among communities of color. Playing a pivotal role in the creation of a Covid-19 vaccine, she admits, is her own hard act to follow. So now she is also focused on paving a path to help other Black women scientists shatter boundaries.
5. Cockatoos Know How to Pick the Right Tools for the Job: ,The job, in these experiments, was getting a cashew out of a puzzle box.
   • Dr. Osuna-Mascaró, who previously worked on chimps, adapted the termite fishing task for a group of captive cockatoos. Instead of bugs, the grand prize was a cashew, their favorite food. Getting the treat out of a puzzle box required two tools: a short, sharp tool that had to first cut a membrane blocking the bird’s access to the nut, and a long, flimsy pole that had to be stuck into the hole to fish out the cashew. Once presented with the box and the tools, six of 10 cockatoos were able to innovate the correct solution. One, Figaro, figured it out in 31 seconds, and another, Fini, did it in 34 seconds.
   • The researchers then tested whether the cockatoos could pick the right tools to get a cashew from a simpler box, which had no membrane and thus required only the fishing pole. When given the simpler box, the birds picked up the pole significantly more than would be expected if they were choosing between the two tools at random, showing they understood that it was the right tool for the fishing task.

2/8/2023 — David Harris Day

1. David Harris, Leader of Vietnam Draft Resistance Movement, Dies at 76: An activist who went to jail for refusing to serve in the military, he teamed with and married Joan Baez and later became a journalist.
   • But a freshman year awakening, including a few weeks working in Mississippi at the end of Freedom Summer in 1964, persuaded him that his generation had a moral obligation to fight injustice, including what he saw as the unfolding disaster in Vietnam. Over the next several years, he used his establishment standing to rise to national prominence, calling on his fellow students and other young people to confront the draft head on.
   • A few months after his indictment, he married the singer Joan Baez, whom he met through the antiwar movement. The two had been touring the country for 16 months, with her singing and playing guitar as a warm-up to his antiwar stemwinders. “There wasn’t any question to me that this guy had enormous talent for speaking,” Ms. Baez said in a phone interview. “We’d go around, do this dog and pony show, and I would open up for him, singing, and people would all get together to hear David Harris talking about how we’re going to change the world.”
   • Mr. Harris was convicted in 1969 and sentenced to three years in federal prison, of which he served 20 months. Soon after his sentencing, Ms. Baez wrote “A Song for David,” in which she lamented, “The stars in your sky/Are the stars in mine/And both prisoners/Of this life are we.”
   • He was released in 1970, but life out of prison was a tough adjustment for him, both personally and professionally. The war was beginning to wind down, as was the antiwar movement. He and Ms. Baez divorced a few months later, though they remained close friends the rest of his life.
2. AI can now create images out of thin air. See how it works.
   • Referenced from What to know about OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT: The viral chatbot’s creator is rocketing into the mainstream
     • After that, OpenAI tried to replicate GPT-3’s success by feeding it computer code and creating a tool called Codex, which helps computer programmers write code faster. Codex fuels GitHub’s Co-Pilot, a publicly available tool that translates human instructions into computer code for a monthly fee. (Microsoft owns GitHub.)
3. Extraordinary Letters on Love, Life, Death, Courage, and Moral Purpose Without Religion: From a Victorian woman who lived and died with uncommon bravery.
   • Whatever we cannot know let us simply and truthfully agree not to know, but no one must be expected to take for granted what reason refuses to admit. More and more to me this simplest of thoughts seems right: Live, live keenly, live fully; make ample use of every power that has been given us to use, to use for the good end. Blind yourself to nothing; look straight at sadness, loss, evil; but at the same time look with such intense delight at all that is good and noble that quite naturally the heart’s longing will be to help the glory to triumph, and that to have been a strong fighter in that cause will appear the only end worth achieving. The length of life does not depend on us, but as long as we can look back to no waste of time we can face the end with a clear conscience, with cheerful if somewhat tired eyes and ready for the deserved rest with no hope or anxiety for what may come. To me all the effort of man seems vain, and his ideal thrown ruthlessly to the ground by himself, when, after a life of free and joyful effort, he stoops to pick up a reward he does not deserve for having simply done his duty.
   • Four years after her terminal diagnosis, as two world wars staked on religious ideology lay in wait for her children, after four savaging surgeries and a heart attack had left her in constant acute pain, the 38-year-old Olga Jacoby died by self-induced euthanasia, intent to “go to sleep with a good conscience,” a pioneer of what we today call the right-to-die movement — another fundamental human right stymied only by the legal residue of religiosity. Inscribed into her letters is the beautiful source-code of a moral and spiritual alternative to religion — a courageous case for the right to live by truth, beauty, and altruism rather than by dogma and delusion, the heart of which beats in a passage from a letter she penned in the dead of winter two years into her diagnosis:
     • Charles may have to suffer from too tender a heart, but the world will be the richer for it, and because of that for his life.
     • Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give. Once given out love is set rolling for ever to amass more, resembling an avalanche by the irresistible force with which it sweeps aside all obstacles, but utterly unlike in its effect, for it brings happiness wherever it passes and lands destruction nowhere.

2/7/2023

1. BP scales back climate targets as profits hit record: Energy giant BP has reported record annual profits as it scaled back plans to reduce the amount of oil and gas it produces by 2030.
   • BP boss Bernard Looney said the British company was "helping provide the energy the world needs" while investing the transition to green energy. But it came as the firm scaled back plans to cut carbon emissions by reducing its oil and gas output. The company - which was one of the first oil and gas giants to announce an ambition to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 - had previously promised that emissions would be 35-40% lower by the end of this decade. However, on Tuesday it said it was now targeting a 20-30% cut, saying it needed to keep investing in oil and gas to meet current demands.
   • [ael: gotta ruin the future to make sure people are happy today….]

2/6/2023 — Turquet’s octopus Day

1. At This School, Computer Science Class Now Includes Critiquing Chatbots: Move over, coding. Some schools are asking student programmers to think critically about rapid advances in artificial intelligence.
2. Clue to rising sea levels lies in DNA of 4m-year-old octopus, scientists say
   • In an ingenious approach, a team of 11 scientists – including biologists, geneticists, glaciologists, computer scientists and ice-sheet modellers – looked at the genetics of Turquet’s octopus – a species that has been living around the Antarctic continent for about 4m years.
   • The octopus DNA carries a memory of its past, including how and when different populations were moving and mixing together, exchanging genetic material. The scientists say they detected clear signs that, about 125,000 years ago, some octopus populations on opposite sides of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet had mixed together, with the only likely route being a seaway between the south Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea. “That could only have happened if the ice sheet had completely collapsed,” said Dr Sally Lau, a geneticist at James Cook University who led the research.
   • Prof Nathan Bindoff, an oceanographer and Antarctic expert at the University of Tasmania, said with sea levels that high scientists strongly suspect a melting West Antarctic Ice Sheet must have contributed to those rising sea levels. Bindoff, who was not involved in the research, said using octopus DNA was “the last way I would have thought of having evidence of large sea level changes coming from the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet”.

2/4/2023

1. ‘Historic Arctic outbreak’ crushes records in New England: Mount Washington in New Hampshire logged the U.S.' coldest wind chill ever recorded: minus-108
   • The National Weather Service office serving the Boston region described the cold as “a historic Arctic outbreak for the modern era.” To drive that point home, the Weather Service declared “this is about as cold as it will ever get.” [ael: oh my gosh: be careful what you say….]
   • Even more impressive was the fact that Mount Washington, by some accounts, protruded into the stratosphere — the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere. Ordinarily located more than 20,000 feet above the ground even in the dead of winter, the stratosphere “folded” down in a series of bunched-up pinches. One of them helped tug a filament of the stratosphere low enough that the summit of the 6,288-foot mountain poked into it. That said, the summit did not record a noticeably dramatic uptick in ozone, which would be the case if the stratosphere fully descended to that level.
   • The fleeting, but intense, Arctic cold shot is the result of dual pressure systems parked to the north. A low is pushing east through Ontario en route to the Canadian Maritimes, while Arctic high pressure hovers over the northern Plains. Highs spin clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, while lows spin counterclockwise; like meshing gears, the two oppositely spinning air masses conspire to entrain a strip of polar air from near the Hudson Bay and convey it southeast. At higher altitudes, a lobe of the polar vortex — a pool of frigid air — dived from near Hudson Bay, Canada, directly over Maine.

2/3/2023

1. Minerals are crucial for electric cars and wind turbines. Some worry whether we have enough. Minerals are crucial for electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels. Some worry whether the future supply can meet the rising demand.
   • Now, as the world begins to slowly shift to renewable energy sources, there is a new focus on the materials that will be required to build electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and much more. According to the International Energy Agency, the average electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional gas-powered car; an offshore wind-turbine, meanwhile, requires nine times the mineral inputs of a typical gas-fired power plant.
   • There is no doubt that clean energy — that is, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear and other sources that do not produce greenhouse gas emissions — requires more mineral inputs than power plants run on fossil fuels. The IEA estimates that if the world builds enough renewable energy to meet the goals established in the 2015 Paris Agreement, mineral demand will double or quadruple in the next 20 years. Countries will need copper for power and transmission lines, lithium for batteries, silicon for solar panels and zinc for wind turbines. [ael: my emphasis]
   • Recent research has also shown that the amount of minerals required for the shift to renewable energy is significant — but falls well within the amount of reserves available. A study released recently by scientists at the University of California at Irvine and MIT found that current reserves of minerals like aluminum, copper, manganese, silver and more should support building enough wind and solar power to meet climate targets.

2/2/2023

1. Jordan Peterson’s ‘zombie’ climate contrarianism follows a well-worn path: The psychologist has turned his hand to exposing new audiences to old arguments from climate change deniers
   • Last year Peterson came in for scathing criticism from climate scientists after claiming climate models were mostly useless. Peterson had badly misunderstood how models work, they said, with one saying: “He sounds intelligent, but he’s completely wrong.” The criticism appears to have done little to discourage him from wading in even further. Peterson’s popularity among conservatives and, judging by many of the comments he receives, his almost God-like status among his fans, is helping to expose new audiences to old arguments on climate change.
2. Microplastics Are Filling the Skies. Will They Affect the Climate? Recent studies reveal that tiny pieces of plastic are constantly lofted into the atmosphere. These particles can travel thousands of miles and affect the formation of clouds, which means they have the potential to impact temperature, rainfall, and even climate change.
   • Plastic has become an obvious pollutant over recent decades, choking turtles and seabirds, clogging up our landfills and waterways. But in just the past few years, a less-obvious problem has emerged. Researchers are starting to get concerned about how tiny bits of plastic in the air, lofted into the skies from seafoam bubbles or spinning tires on the highway, might potentially change our future climate. “Here’s something that people just didn’t think about — another aspect of plastic pollution,” says environmental analytical chemist Denise Mitrano of ETH Zürich University, in Switzerland, who co-wrote an article last November highlighting what researchers know — and don’t yet know — about how plastics can change clouds, potentially altering temperature and rainfall patterns.
   • “The people who invented plastics all those decades ago, who were very proud of inventions that transformed society in many ways — I doubt they envisaged that plastics were going to end up floating around in the atmosphere and potentially influencing the global climate system,” says Laura Revell, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “We are still learning what the impacts are for humans, ecosystems, and climate. But certainly, from what we know so far, it doesn’t look good.”
   • 
   • Kanji says skies heavily polluted with plastic will probably make both more high-altitude ice clouds, which tend to warm the Earth’s surface, and more low-altitude water clouds, which tend to cool the Earth. Which effect will dominate is unknown. “It doesn’t make sense to model it at the moment, given the poor estimates we have of [atmospheric] plastic,” says Kanji. Plastic could also affect precipitation patterns: in general, Kanji says, clouds that are more polluted tend to last longer before bursting into rain than do less polluted clouds, and then they rain more heavily.
   • Revell and her colleagues are now whittling down the assumptions in their paper, working out more detailed calculations for more realistic estimates of plastic concentrations, colors, and sizes. “All we know is that the problem is not going to go away anytime soon,” she says. “These plastics are incredibly long lived. They’re breaking down, and they’re going to be forming new microplastics for centuries. We just don’t know how big the problem is that we’ve committed ourselves to.”
3. Biden Clears the Way for Alaska Oil Project: The administration issued an analysis that indicates a scaled-back version of the Willow project could go forward. Opponents call the drilling plan a “carbon bomb.”
   • WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Wednesday took a crucial step toward approving a $8 billion ConocoPhillips oil drilling project on the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, drawing the anger of environmentalists who say the vast new fossil fuel development poses a dire threat to the climate. The Bureau of Land Management issued an environmental analysis that says the government prefers a scaled-back version of the project, which is known as Willow. The assessment calls for curtailing the project to three drill sites from five, as well as reducing the proposed length of both gravel and ice roads, pipelines and the length of airstrips to support the drilling.
   • [ael: "Separately, Bureau of Land Management and White House officials are considering additional measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and environmental harm, such as delaying decisions on permits for one of the drill sites and planting trees, according to two people familiar with the discussions." — oh that will help…]
   • The Department of the Interior issued a statement saying the agency still had “substantial concerns” about the Willow project, “including direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and impacts to wildlife and Alaska Native subsistence.” The analysis notes that the agency might make final changes “that would be more environmentally protective” like delaying a ruling about permits to more than one drill site.
   • Environmental activists said Mr. Biden was betraying his own climate change agenda. They noted that even reducing the number of drill sites would still allow the company to extract most of the area’s vast petroleum reserve, leading to 278 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the project’s 30-year lifetime, about the annual equivalent emissions of 66 new coal-fired power plants.
   • “No other oil and gas project has greater potential to undermine the Biden administration’s climate goals,” said Karlin Itchoak, Alaska regional director for The Wilderness Society. “If this project were to move forward, it would result in the production and burning of at least 30 years of oil at a time when the world needs climate solutions and a transition to clean energy.”
   • ConocoPhillips has said it was hoping for a fast decision from the Biden administration that would allow construction to begin this winter. If spring sets in and warmer temperatures begin to melt the frozen roads, it could make it more difficult for crews to pass and construction would have to be shelved for another year. Therein lies one of the Willow project’s ironies. Over the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the United States and the region is expected to continue to warm by an average of 4 degrees Fahrenheit over the 30-year life of the Willow project, thawing the frozen Arctic tundra around the drilling rigs and shortening the winter season during which ice roads and bridges remain frozen.
   • The proposed solution: ConocoPhillips plans to eventually install “chillers” into the thawing permafrost to keep it solid enough to support the equipment to drill for oil — the burning of which will release carbon dioxide emissions that will worsen the ice melt.
   • Willow was initially approved by the Trump administration and the Biden administration later defended the approval in court. The project was then temporarily blocked by a judge who said that the prior administration’s environmental analysis was not sufficient and did not fully consider the potential harm to wildlife or the further impact on climate change.

2/1/2023 — Harold H. Brown Day

1. I grew up evangelical. Terrifying rapture films scarred me for ever: Tales of wars, plagues and starvation left my friends and me fearing we’d be ‘left behind’. They haunt me to this day
   • [ael: thinking of this especially today, because my childhood friend Jeff Barnes and I were "assaulted" by one of these films during our friend Tom Apple's brief dalliance with the Baptist church. Jeff died yesterday.]
   • Related: The life and death of John Chau, the man who tried to convert his killers: The 26-year-old American adventure blogger was killed by an isolated tribe last year. His father blames ‘extreme’ Christianity
     • Chau’s decision to contact the Sentinelese, who have made it clear over the years that they prefer to be left alone, was indefensibly reckless. But it was not a spontaneous act of recklessness by a dim-witted thrill-seeker; it was a premeditated act of recklessness by a fairly intelligent and thoughtful thrill-seeker who spent years preparing, understood the risks, including to his own life, and believed his purpose on Earth was to bring Christ to the island he considered “Satan’s last stronghold”.
     • In October, Chau traveled on a tourist visa to Port Blair, the Andaman islands’ regional capital, and took up residence in what he described as a “safe house”. There he assembled an “initial contact response kit” – including picture cards for communication, bandages and dental forceps for removing arrows – and gifts for the Sentinelese: tweezers, scissors, cord, safety pins, fish hooks. He carefully documented his activities in a handwritten diary. The resulting, 13-page testament – written with the earnestness and self-consciousness of someone who had digested many missionary and anthropologist accounts of indigenous contact and knew he might be writing for posterity – recounts his final days in fascinating and tragic detail.
2. ChatGPT maker OpenAI releases ‘not fully reliable’ tool to detect AI generated content: OpenAI is calling on educators to give their feedback on how the tool is used, amid rising concerns around AI-assisted cheating at universities
   • [ael: this is our new gig: spy versus spy!]
   • But they admited the classifier “is not fully reliable” and only correctly identified 26% of AI-written English texts. It also incorrectly labelled human-written texts as probably written by AI tools 9% of the time.
3. Harold Brown, Tuskegee Airman Who Faced a Lynch Mob, Dies at 98: One of the last surviving Black pilots from that celebrated group, he was surrounded by an angry mob after parachuting from his P-51 over Austria during World War II.
   • Harold H. Brown, who as a teenager overcame racial prejudice in the American South to become an Army Air Corps fighter pilot during World War II — a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen — only to be downed over Austria and face a lynch mob of vengeful villagers, died on Jan. 12 in Huron, Ohio. He was 98.
   • He was one of the last surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen, a group that included 355 pilots who served in segregated units operating from the war’s Mediterranean theater after beginning their training at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Fewer than 10 are still living, according to Tuskegee Airmen Inc., an organization dedicated to preserving their legacy.
   • “The first time I was integrated was in a P.O.W. camp,” Dr. Brown said. “I lived in an integrated base in the military, leave the base and went home to a segregated civilian life.”
   • The Tuskegee Airmen knew they had to be as good as their white counterparts, if not better. “It was felt that this big experiment was going to fail and fall flat on its face. They’ll never make it as pilots,” Dr. Brown told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2019. “That was really one of our biggest motivations, that we cannot fail.”
   • The Tuskegee Airmen’s success was credited with accelerating the integration of the armed forces. “What the Tuskegee Airmen did is not Black history,” Dr. Brown told The Plain Dealer. “It’s not military history. It’s American history.”
4. We’ve lost a giant: Vale Professor Will Steffen, climate science pioneer: One of Australia’s leading climate scientists, Professor Will Steffen, died on Sunday. Steffen has been hailed as a brilliant climate thinker, selfless mentor and gifted communicator. He is survived by his wife Carrie and daughter Sonja. Steffen’s colleagues and friends remember him here.
   • He never saw deniers or obstructionist politicians as his personal enemies. He didn’t waste his time on the negativity of climate politics. While he was angry at the way the selfish actions of vested interests were sacrificing the future of coming generations, including his daughter, Sonja, he did not despair. Instead, he channelled his anger into action.
   • When the Abbott government shut down the Climate Commission in 2013, Will and his colleagues – Tim Flannery, Lesley Hughes and Amanda McKenzie – didn’t just quit. Instead they crowd-sourced A$1 million in a week and founded the Climate Council, now a leading independent source of climate advice in Australia.
   • Would he have been happy about recent efforts to speed up action on climate change? Yes and no. He felt, as I do, that things are much further advanced and much worse than generally recognised. He felt limiting global warming to 1.5℃ was already well out of reach and that it was going to be very difficult to keep it under 2℃. While he was heartened by recent progress, he knew it was all but impossible to change fast enough to keep warming to a safer level. But he knew we had to try.
5. Six lifestyle choices to slow memory decline named in 10-year study: Over-60s who combined more healthy lifestyle choices enjoyed most benefit, found Beijing researchers
   • A healthy lifestyle score combining six factors was calculated: a healthy diet; regular exercise; active social contact; cognitive activity; non-smoking; and not drinking alcohol.
   • A healthy diet was deemed as eating the recommended intake of at least seven out of 12 food groups: fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, dairy, salt, oil, eggs, cereals, legumes, nuts and tea.
   • After accounting for factors likely to affect the results, the researchers found that each individual healthy behaviour was associated with a slower-than-average decline in memory over 10 years.
   • A healthy diet had the strongest effect on slowing memory decline, followed by cognitive activity and then physical exercise.

Time machine:

• What went on: 2022
• What went on: 2021
• What went on: 2020
• What went on: 2019
• What went on: 2018
• What went on: 2017
• What went on: 2016
• What went on: 2015
• What went on: 2014

RClimate Examples

• Here's the 10-day weather forecast for Mattawa, Ontario, where we have a farm. I try to spend as much time as I can on the farm.
• Public News Service - Environment
• More quotes:
  • Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. HANNAH ARENDT. From the Introduction to “Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism”, by Henry Giroux.