IN PUTIN'S POST-SOVIET ECONOMIC CALCULUS, THE HUMAN COST OF CENTENNIAL SCALE FLOODS,DROUGHT, AND FOREST FIRES IS ECLIPSED BY DOUBLE DIGIT ECONOMIC GROWTH.
IN PUTIN'S POST-SOVIET ECONOMIC CALCULUS, THE HUMAN COST OF CENTENNIAL SCALE FLOODS,DROUGHT, AND FOREST FIRES IS ECLIPSED BY DOUBLE DIGIT ECONOMIC GROWTH.
On April 19, Tucker Carlson informed Joe Rogan that aliens good and bad are supernatural entities that transgress:
'the laws of nature as we understand them”
He warned Rogan that killer UFO’s are plunging in and out of the Seven Seas at will, tearing around:
“at 500 knots as measured by sonar, much faster than any object can actually go.”
Tuck reassured Rogan his views were based not on the investigations of the quack journalist who sold Walter Cronkite on the reality of the Pyramids of Mars, but those of well-credentialed Stanford immunologist Gary Nolan M.D.,
who though lacking Earthly experience in materials science or engineering, has re-invented himself as the premier authority on "alien materials" which are scientifically defined as materials neither he or Tuck have ever seen before.
Tuck went on to add:
"There is a spiritual component here for sure. People will worship A.I. as a god. A.I., Ted Kaczynski was likely right, will get away from us. We will be controlled by the thing that we made …
We have a moral obligation to murder it immediately, and since it’s not alive we don’t need to feel bad about that…”
Potsdam
om an ancient warm climate.JULIA MARKS PETERSON
SCIENCE 24 APRIL 2024 Goudschmit conference report
VIENNA—Samples of eerie blue glacial ice from Antarctica are a staggering 6 million years old, scientists announced last week, doubling the previous record for Earth’s oldest ice. The ice opens a new window on Earth’s ancient climate—one that isn’t exactly what scientists expected.
Bubbles in the ice trap air from the Pliocene epoch, a time before the ice ages when the planet was several degrees warmer than today and carbon dioxide (CO2) levels may have been just as high as they are now. But an initial analysis of the bubbles suggests CO2 levels were rather low in the late Pliocene and only sank slightly between 2.7 million and 1 million years ago as the Pliocene ended, the ice ages began, and Earth headed toward a dramatic climate shift that caused ice ages to grow longer and deeper.
The results are preliminary, stresses Ed Brook, a geochemist at Oregon State University (OSU) and leader of the U.S. Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), which presented the discovery last week here in multiple talks at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly. But if even a tiny drop in CO2can kick off a major climate change, Brook adds, “you know, we probably care about that.”
Finding ice this old is “fantastic,” says Eric Wolff, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Cambridge who wasn’t involved in the work... Wolff adds. “Nothing’s quite as direct as actually taking a bubble, snapping it open, and putting it straight into a mass spectrometer.”...
To date the ice, Sarah Shackleton, a paleoclimatologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and colleagues at Princeton University analyzed the argon isotopes contained in its air bubbles. But the technique consumes a lot of the ice, leaving little of a standard 8-centimeter core left over for other analyses of the same ice layer. For now, the team has only drilled small cores of the 6-million-year-old ice, so its age is all they know, Brook says. They’re heading back to Antarctica next austral summer to retrieve larger samples.
But last season, Brook and his colleagues did manage to drill jumbo-size cores of ice as old as 3 million years. These cores, as wide as a dinner plate, yielded hundreds of samples of ancient air—including the first ever from the Pliocene, which ended about 2.6 million years ago with the start of the ice ages
Scientists think high levels of CO2 were responsible for the Pliocene’s warmth. Proxy data from sediment cores, such as the chemical compositions of the shells of tiny marine algae and plant leaf waxes, suggest CO2 was probably about as high as today’s unnaturally elevated level, 425 parts per million (ppm). But not one blue ice sample older than 1 million years exceeded 300 ppm, says Julia Marks Peterson, a paleoclimatologist at OSU who performed the greenhouse gas analysis.
The greenhouse gas data also raise questions about a mysterious climate shift that began about 1.2 million years ago. At this time, something caused the ice ages to grow longer and more intense, stretching out from mild 40,000-year cycles to deeper 100,000-year cycles. The leading theory for this flip is that CO2levels dropped, allowing ice sheets to grow too thick to melt away on a 40,000-year cycle. A new climate record from clues preserved in sediment cores, reported in February, supports that picture. But the snapshots across the transition found in the blue ice suggest CO2 levels held steady between about 220 ppm and 250 ppm. “We don’t see much change in CO2,” Marks Peterson says. “That doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. But it might be smaller than we expected.”
Gideon Lichfield: So, in the book, one of the most interesting things that happens politically is that a schism emerges within conservatism, even as there's this increasing climate denialism as a feature of the right. There is also a conservative president who's elected on a green platform. In the book, the climate activists help bring about that schism by crossing political divides and appealing to Republicans. Do you see any sign of that happening in our real world today?
Stephen Markley: I've long seen those signs. There's a former congressman named Bob Inglis who I think deserves way more credit than he ever gets for being a sort of tireless advocate for climate. He lost in the Tea Party wave back in 2010 and got absolutely hammered because he was like, “Yeah, I believe the science, and I think we should do something about this crisis.” After he was voted out, he spent his entire life basically talking to all the people the climate movement would never talk to. Going on conservative talk shows, going on the radio, just sort of endlessly humping that Sisyphean boulder up the hill. And I do think—and I get these emails and comments from people—that there are more, especially young Republicans and young conservatives who don't have their heads buried in the sand on this, but they also operate within an ecosystem where the mouthpieces and the organs of right-wing politics are so loud and so vociferous, it's really hard for those people to gain purchase. But I still think as people's economic interests become more tied to the energy transition, that is going to begin to change—it's just a matter of how fast it changes.
Gideon Lichfield: One of the central characters in the book is Kate Morris, this climate activist who is instrumental in helping part of the right accept the green agenda. How important is it, do you think, to have this figurehead for the climate movement? Other than Greta Thunberg there isn't really that kind of figure at the moment. Do you think we need someone like that in order to push the climate fight forward?
Stephen Markley: I've long seen those signs. There's a former congressman named Bob Inglis who I think deserves way more credit than he ever gets for being a sort of tireless advocate for climate. He lost in the Tea Party wave back in 2010 and got absolutely hammered because he was like, “Yeah, I believe the science, and I think we should do something about this crisis.” After he was voted out, he spent his entire life basically talking to all the people the climate movement would never talk to. Going on conservative talk shows, going on the radio, just sort of endlessly humping that Sisyphean boulder up the hill. And I do think—and I get these emails and comments from people—that there are more, especially young Republicans and young conservatives who don't have their heads buried in the sand on this, but they also operate within an ecosystem where the mouthpieces and the organs of right-wing politics are so loud and so vociferous, it's really hard for those people to gain purchase. But I still think as people's economic interests become more tied to the energy transition, that is going to begin to change—it's just a matter of how fast it changes.
Gideon Lichfield: One of the central characters in the book is Kate Morris, this climate activist who is instrumental in helping part of the right accept the green agenda. How important is it, do you think, to have this figurehead for the climate movement? Other than Greta Thunberg there isn't really that kind of figure at the moment. Do you think we need someone like that in order to push the climate fight forward?
Some centuries ago a planetary scientist by the name of Newton took time off from calculating orbits and wrote an optics primer with a chapter on why some things are highly refractive and others not. As the most refractive liquids at his disposal, olive and clove oil, could be burnt to soot, he correctly surmised that the most refractive solid he knew of might be carbonaceous too, and called diamond : "an unctuous substance much coagulated."
While CO2 gets all the advertising these days it's important to recall that gases in general are refractive too, so planetary optics vary a lot. Carl Sagan deserves credit for discovering that Mars thin ring of atmosphere can concentrate starlight onto a caustic curve at a focal length sometimes approximating the red planet's distance from the Earth, turning its atmosphere into a telescope of sorts.
WEBB WAS IN FOCUS, TITAN'S ATMOSPHERE NOT SO MUCH, AND THE OIL SPILL ON THAT EARTHRISE IS ACTUALLY THE MOON'S SHADOW |
A group of researchers wants a ‘nutrition label ’on papers giving the journal's acceptance rate, the number of reviewers who read each paper, and their authors competing interests “We want to help readers, including researchers, the media and the public, to decide whether an article is worth reporting on or citing,” says its founder, educator John Willinsky. |
PALE CARBONATES UNDER DARK SOILS |