► Air Pollution Is Massively Reducing Human Intelligence

https://www.motherjones.com/environm...-saving-trees/

^ That will be great if it's true, OH: a simple remedy which will make the world look a prettier place too. Many governments might be prepared to finance the planting of trees, and imo any city street or industrial landscape, for instance, looks better with a few trees in it.

Unfortunately, this new report paints a starker picture - the worst being that it proposes solutions that you just know will never get implemented:-

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45775309

The BBC article quotes this commentary on the new report:-

So you're coming around to my POV? The only bright spot is that in the future I might be sitting on the beach front property I always wanted.

See I told you. All we need are plants and water.

I don’t think it’s a one stop solution but it’s way ****ing better than doing nothing. Trees do hold carbon. That’s a fact.

^ Yes, I also doubt that that alone will be enough: to me it's pretty clear that the present exponential population growth has to be reduced, and ditto habits and industries that add to global warming.

^ TBH, there's been no real shift in my pov since I started this thread. Even if the end result is in doubt, you should try to make some personal efforts to reduce your carbon footprint, and you should vote for politicians who promise to protect the environment and turn away, for example, from fossil fuels.
Perhaps these days it sounds like a piece of hippie-dippie nonsense, but I like this Native American saying that I came across recently:


^ HaHa! A joke of course, but even as a joke it has a fallacy: you might instead find yourself sharing your beach-front real-estate with a refugee family from Florida. This would be the benign version, with a system of government-controlled billeting in place. The other version is more apocalyptic, and involves you losing possession of your porch to the millions of refugees moving like a Biblical scourge across the land in advance of the rising sea-levels. :eek:

After reading the article yesterday about the twelve years left the planet has : https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b0876eda9ef1d7

I am extremely doubtful that the world is suddenly going to change for the better and I do believe that the world will go under. At least in Sweden the report is being taken quite seriously..actually the entire environment issue has been taken quite seriously for quite some time. But then, no matter what we do here, it is not being reflected around us. For example, there is a big push here at keeping the local waters around Stockholm (Mälaren) clean. You can fish for herring , pike, perch in the middle of the city, take it home and eat it. No problem. But then, those waters connect with the Baltic sea and there you have countries like Russia and Lithuania pumping out poison into their waters. And we have to work even harder to keep the water clean. It's not fair but we have to do this in order to keep it clean enough for our environment.

Same thing with the global environment. I don't see countries like the US really taking the report seriously as a whole. I don't think that no mattter what efforts we do here (and they already are saying that now Sweden has to make double the effort we are already making) having an impact on the whole.To be honest, I just feel like doubling my saving efforts at this point, retiring with my husband even earlier then we hoped for, and just go out exploring the world before it is gone. At least I know that that is achievable.

On the latest hurricane from NYT

I’m fairly surprised at how poorly understood this is by so many.

From the same article

Uh, hot water moves more. That’s pretty much the story. The challenge now is accepting that the **** you learned in school affects things.

Is that meant to illustrate the futility of combating rising water levels?

I just thought it was funny.

When it comes to environmental impact, almost nothing is free and of course when a zillion people all do the same thing, the impact can be serious. Here's an article about Netflix and wi-fi which has some uncomfortable stats about something most of us indulge in all the time I imagine:-

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45798523

Here's a very striking quote if you don't feel like reading the whole article:-

The article also talks about the energy consumption of having round-the-clock wi-fi. Do you keep the wi-fi running even when you know you'll be asleep for eight hours? In my case, guilty as charged, I'm sorry to say. :o: The only thing I can say in my defense is that I haven't downloaded the song Despacito - so that's good, right?

So whats the actual environmental impact?

We are starting a superfund cleanup project (cooking the ground for a year) on a couple acres at my job which is going to cost $15million in electricity alone and thats just phase one. I wonder How that compares.

So basically wi-fi is an environmental evil that will exist so long as it can exist cause no amount of knowledge will stop it? The internet is simply something that the human race will cling to until we simply can't through force.

The internet tubes are leaking hate mail and ****posts into the ocean.

Kiribati hates the internet and disposable diapers equally then.

Despacito is a greater weapon against mankind than brute force ever could be.

^ Every time someone downloads Despacito, a puppy-dog dies on Kiribati. :(

^ I suppose that almost all elec production damages the environment somehow, so the higher the consumption, the worse the impact.

^ Cooking the ground for a year sounds like extreme treatment - what contamination are you planning to clean up, DWV ?

Mostly jet fuel, mercury, and PFAs from WW2 naval operations. This particular site is mostly BTEX. Another site we just started is littered with UXOs from the old shooting range.

Its all public info. Ill try and find our superfund specific site and post it.

Heres some stuff but not what i was looking for:

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cu...cfm?id=0201178

https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/Si...ion=02&type=SC

(Mildly interesting, maybe)
I found my job listing from when I applied for the position: https://lensa.com/geographic-informa...2363b7b13b842f

Google is your friend.

^ ...but please make sure that your computer is powered by a wind-turbine on the roof before using the internet. ;)

That is a super-impressive job description DWV! I couldn't do a single thing on the "Tasks include" list, in fact I didn't understand what most of the tasks were. As for the "Minimum Requirements" list, that was so long, it quickly became tl;dr.

:bowdown:
__________________________________________________ ________________

Here's that rare thing, a feel-good story about the environment, although there is a rather alarming statistic right at the end.



As Lilja points out, it's disheartening that small-scale positive action is so dwarfed by damage going on elsewhere:-

Why wouldn't you make any effort to explain what you were talking about? A post shouldn't be designed in such a way that you need to Google half of it.

Its contamination from naval activities.

If i told you BTEX is Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene, and Xylene does that really help(found in jet fuel). Its chem stuff i dont know much about either. PFAs are polyfluoroalkalines(sp?) mostly found in fire fighting foam from all the experiments.

UXOs are unexploded ordinances so live ammo and missles in the ground. We are using ground penteating radar to identify it below ground along with metal detectors to begin prep for monitoring well installation and groundwater sampligng.

What's penteating?

Penetrating*

* *penetrating

Even at this point, what he said still startled me a little. The part if the climate fixing itself was especially unnerving. I know we should be immune to it by now but that one was weird enough to make an impact.

As I guess you know I live in hurricane country. Even here people don’t understand how hurricanes form and how they’re fueled. I’m sure more than half think god just stirs them up in heaven and tosses them across the ocean. Well, you know how it is.

Wait what did Trump say now?

He said bring back my thread!

That’s 3 cat 5’s in two weeks

This ain’t business as usual

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science...why-ncna935261

Climate change may be dissolving the ocean floor. Here's why we should be worried.

Dislike the click bait alarmist headline tbh

^ That's a worrying piece of news, and follows an alarmingly common pattern in environmental science these days: the discovery of new things we have screwed up.

Here's more bad news for an overheating planet, although this time, at least, we are blameless:-

South Pole Hotspot Causes Ice Sheet To Sag:- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46202255

How often do we think about what is under the Antarctic Ice Sheet? Probably not often in the course of a normal day, but if you have that kind of curiosity, you might enjoy a documentary on Antarctica's sub glacial lakes. There's one on Youtube, I think.

Are wildfires getting worse and more frequent? Here are two at-a-glance answers:-

i) This is what you can learn from America's official EPA website, which reports on nothing after 2015 as if a three-year delay before announcing statistics is normal. Of all things that are monitored, (from temperature, through economic indicators, to album of the year), who else but the EPA keeps monitoring but doesn't release the information?


ii) In comparison, The World Resources Institute focuses on Europe but are somehow capable of showing stats that go right up to June 2018. How very modern of them!

Five Graphs Show Just How Unusual This Year's Wildfires Are:- https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/08/5-g...-wildfires-are

Same as Mexico Beach one good thing about Camp Fire is a lot of exurbs where people shouldn’t live anyway is being destroyed.

The new US government report, The Fourth National Climate Assessment is full of bad news, I'm afraid. The bottom line seems to be that we are already suffering from the effects of global warming and it'll be getting worse. This is how CNN and the BBC are assessing the report:-


The White House's obvious hope of burying the report by releasing it over a national holiday weekend turns out to be more ironic than they imagined: a Black Friday indeed.