36 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2024
    1. Eine extreme Hitzewelle hat in der Sahelzone Hunderte, wahrscheinlich Tausende Menschenleben gefordert. World Weather Attribution zufolge ist die Höhe der Temperaturen eindeutig auf die globale Erhitzung durch Treibhausgase zurückzuführen. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/18/lethal-heatwave-in-sahel-worsened-by-fossil-fuel-burning-study-finds

      Zur Studie: https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/extreme-sahel-heatwave-that-hit-highly-vulnerable-population-at-the-end-of-ramadan-would-not-have-occurred-without-climate-change/

  2. Jan 2024
    1. Zusammenfassender Artikel über Studien zu Klimafolgen in der Antarktis und zu dafür relevanten Ereignissen. 2023 sind Entwicklungen sichtbar geworden, die erst für wesentlich später in diesem Jahrhundert erwartet worden waren. Der enorme und möglicherweise dauerhafte Verlust an Merreis ist dafür genauso relevant wie die zunehmende Instabilität des westantarktischen und möglicherweise inzwischen auch des ostantarktischen Eisschilds. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/31/red-alert-in-antarctica-the-year-rapid-dramatic-change-hit-climate-scientists-like-a-punch-in-the-guts

  3. Dec 2023
    1. There is now as big a disparity in carbon emissions within countries as there is between them
      • for: carbon emissions - within and between countries, Southern-North, Northern-South, Local North, Local South, Global North - Global South terminology - improving

      • comment

        • The wealth and carbon inequality both between and within countries can be better articulated using terminology developed by Stop Reset Go
          • Southern-North
          • Northern-South
          • Local North
          • Local South
      • reference

  4. Nov 2023
  5. Aug 2023
  6. Jun 2023
    1. Ausführliche Erklärung des El Nino Phänomens mit einer instruktiven Animation. In diesem und im kommenden Jahr könnte dieses Phänomen in Verbindung mit den Temperaturerhöhungen durch die Treibhausgase zu globalen Temperaturrekorden führen. Mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit wird es Extremwetterereignisse verstärken.

      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/24/el-nino-how-the-weather-event-is-affecting-global-heating-in-2023

  7. Feb 2023
    1. Going forward, disposal plans including locations and transportation routes for contaminated waste will be subject to EPA review and approval, she said.

      Government slows down and impedes everything under the pretense of making it better. This is yet another example of that.

    1. When train 32N passedthe next HBD, at MP 69.01, the bearing’s recorded temperature was 103°F aboveambient. The third HBD, at MP 49.81, recorded the suspect bearing’s temperature at253°F above ambient.

      Though trending up, the bearing temperature was within non-critical limits until shortly before the wreck occurred. It was about 46 miles between the last detector and the one that alerted just before the accident.

    2. The train engineer increased the dynamic brake application to further slow andstop the train. During this deceleration, an automatic emergency brake applicationinitiated, and train 32N came to a stop.

      After being alerted to the unsafe condition, the crew seemed to respond appropriately by slowing down to stop, but during that process derailment further back in the train must have separated the air hoses causing the emergency braking application.

      This suggests that the crew didn't throw the train into emergency as some had suggested.

    3. The positive train control system was enabled and operating at thetime of the derailment.

      No other trains were involved, but this system is intended to prevent multi-train collisions or crews inattentively passing stopped signals. It indicates that the crew was alert enough to be following inputs within the confines of the system.

    4. Train 32N was traveling about 47mph at the time of the derailment, which was less than the maximum authorizedtimetable speed of 50 mph.

      So we know it wasn't speeding as some had alleged.

    1. We ought to know when there is something that is very volatile that is coming into the State of Ohio

      A lot of these chemicals are made in Ohio. Seems goofy to be all concerned about stuff coming in that we make right here.

  8. Nov 2022
  9. Sep 2022
  10. Jul 2022
    1. 21:27 - We are just as smart now as we were in the ice age

      Our neurophysiology has not changed much since the ice age. In other words, were an ice age descendent were transported by a time machine and were born in our current era, (s)he would have the same cognitive capacity as a modern human.

      Peter mentions that we came out of our caves and begun agriculture. There is an interesting research paper that hypothesizes that over a period of the last 1.5 million years, human hunters in the Southern Levant successively extirpated the largest species by overshooting hunting over many generations, until the wild fauna population could no longer support human populations, at which point, humans may have turned to agriculture out of necessity. If true, this would support the idea that nonsustainable practices have been with us for a long time and we were out of balance long before Adam Smith wrote about it.

      https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2021%2F12%2F211221102708.htm&group=world

    1. Prof. Barkai: "In light of previous studies, our team proposed an original hypothesis that links the two questions: We think that large animals went extinct due to overhunting by humans, and that the change in diet and the need to hunt progressively smaller animals may have propelled the changes in humankind. In this study we tested our hypotheses in light of data from excavations in the Southern Levant covering several human species over a period of 1.5 million years." Jacob Dembitzer adds: "We considered the Southern Levant (Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Southwest Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) to be an 'archaeological laboratory' due to the density and continuity of prehistoric findings covering such a long period of time over a relatively small area -- a unique database unavailable anywhere else in the world. Excavations, which began 150 years ago, have produced evidence for the presence of humans, beginning with Homo erectus who arrived 1.5 million years ago, through the neandertals who lived here from an unknown time until they disappeared about 45,000 years ago, to modern humans (namely, ourselves) who came from Africa in several waves, starting around 180,000 years ago."

      The different hominin species studied in this well defined, archeologically rich region were Homo Erectus, Neandertals and Modern Humans..

    2. Findings indicate a continual decline in the size of game hunted by humans as their main food source -- from giant elephants 1-1.5 million years ago down to gazelles 10,000 years ago. According to the researchers, these findings paint an illuminating picture of the interaction between humans and the animals around them over the last 1.5 million years.

      1.5 million years trend of fauna of decreasing body mass in the Southern Levant - from giant elephants to gazelles.

    3. In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size -- improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

      This is an extraordinary claim, that due to extirpation of fauna prey species, we resorted to agriculture. In other words, that we hunted the largest prey, and when they went extinct, went after the next largest species until all the large megafauna became extinct. According to this claim, agriculture became a necessity due to our poor intergenerational resource management skills.

    1. Multiple large-bodied species went extinct during the Pleistocene. Changing climates and/or human hunting are the main hypotheses used to explain these extinctions. We studied the causes of Pleistocene extinctions in the Southern Levant, and their subsequent effect on local hominin food spectra, by examining faunal remains in archaeological sites across the last 1.5 million years. We examined whether climate and climate changes, and/or human cultures, are associated with these declines. We recorded animal abundances published in the literature from 133 stratigraphic layers, across 58 Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological sites, in the Southern Levant. We used linear regressions and mixed models to assess the weighted mean mass of faunal assemblages through time and whether it was associated with temperature, paleorainfall, or paleoenvironment (C3 vs. C4 vegetation). We found that weighted mean body mass declined log-linearly through time. Mean hunted animal masses 10,500 years ago, were only 1.7% of those 1.5 million years ago. Neither body size at any period, nor size change from one layer to the next, were related to global temperature or to temperature changes. Throughout the Pleistocene, new human lineages hunted significantly smaller prey than the preceding ones. This suggests that humans extirpated megafauna throughout the Pleistocene, and when the largest species were depleted the next-largest were targeted. Technological advancements likely enabled subsequent human lineages to effectively hunt smaller prey replacing larger species that were hunted to extinction or until they became exceedingly rare.

      We must be careful of overgeneralizing sustainable practices to our early ancestors as the evidence from this research shows that we were not always sustainability-minded. In fact, the evidence suggests that when we find the biggest edible prey fauna species, we hunt them to extinction (extirpate) and when they are no longer able to reproduce in sustainable numbers, we move on to the next largest species. In this way, our early ancestors were the first progenitors of progress traps.

    2. The Southern Levant, situated between modern day southern Syria via Israel to Sinai, has a spatiotemporally dense and continuous Paleolithic archaeological record offering a unique opportunity to detect faunal changes, including those predating the appearance of Homo sapiens (Bar-Yosef, 1980; Stutz, 2014). It is thus a suitable model to test long-term changes in the body mass of mammalian assemblages, in view of paleoclimates and changing human lineages, to decipher whether climate and/or humans are responsible for animal body size declines. The excellent archaeological record can further illuminate whether size declines are observed since hominins first colonized the region, or whether they start with the emergence of Homo sapiens (Louys et al., 2021), or are concentrated in the last glacial and its aftermath. We tested whether the size, and size changes, in hominin prey through the Pleistocene and early Holocene were related to time, the prevailing human lineages and cultures, paleoenvironment, and temperatures.

      Southern Levant is unique for providing records for this study.

  11. Jun 2022
  12. Jan 2022
  13. Jun 2021
    1. One pastor, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, put it to me this way:Having grown up in the South, [I think] Southern Baptist culture is probably uniquely this way, but working in a church that isn’t in the South, this stuff still rears its head. Not as much the same presenting issues, but you still fundamentally get people who are in love with power and will take any means necessary to beat you down so they have power and you are subservient to them, not the Gospel.

      A searing indictment of power within religion...

  14. Oct 2020
  15. May 2020
  16. Aug 2018
  17. May 2017