Old Man and the Apocalypse

Austin is now ranting over at this site for the duration of our the Covid-19 battle.

Taking A Break

Been traveling - not anymore, of course.  Taking a break on this site during the Covid-19 crisis.

Recommend the Johns Hopkins tracker to follow the virus around the world.

No Answers from Politicians

In a small Australian town real people are asking who pays the human costs when the coal fired power plants and coal mines are closed?  Nobody seems to have a practical answer.  

“I don’t think there’s been a great deal of thinking or attention to what [a climate transition] means for small towns like us. What I see is politicians, tourism people, saying each one of our jobs is going to be replaced by a new tourism job. But I don’t see that as practical at all. It fails to take into account that we own houses, businesses, we have settled families. What exactly is our transition plan for these people? Should we just leave our homes and businesses and move..."

Only governments can solve the climate crisis and they will only act if we take to the streets and demand not just technical solutions, but human solutions.

Lenticular Cloud Formation

...lenticular clouds are common around mountains that force incoming air to rise. If that air is carrying water vapor, then when it rises through the atmosphere and its temperature drops, the water will condense into a crowd of water droplets, the same way that droplets cover a cold glass on a warm, humid day. In the sky, the massive collection of suspended droplets forms a lenticular cloud, which erodes as the air sinks back down.

A single lenticular cloud recently appeared downwind of California’s Mount Shasta, per the Post. But Mount Washington’s cloud had another trick to share. Unstable conditions in the atmosphere can lead air currents to rise, while fast, low-density wind sweeps along the top. These wind currents can “sculpt” a cloud into the curlicue shape of a Kelvin-Helmholtz wave, meteorologist Jesse Ferrell tells AccuWeather’s Lauren Fox.  ---  Smithsonian Magazine

The Ocean Will Win

Sea level rise is going to happen.  Wait, that statement is incorrect.  Sea level rise is happening right now.  Multiple California communities are struggling with the encroachment of the ocean most often with expensive project that may, at best, delay the inevitable.  Just north of Monterey, the small town of Marina is planning for the ocean to win and how to accommodate the changes that victory will entail while still retaining their community.

At a time when Del Mar, Pacifica and other coastal cities are fighting to defend their homes and roads from the rising sea, Marina has embarked on a path less traveled. Here in this Army turned university town, residents are learning how to adjust with the ocean as the water moves inland.

“Marina is such a good test case,” said David Revell, a coastal geomorphologist who has advised numerous cities, including Marina, on sea level rise. “Here we have the precedent of a community who understands that … there has to be enough lead time to get things out of the way — before it’s in the way.

“That is a really powerful message to the rest of California.”

Who Says TV Isn't Educational?

Researchers in Finland studied two species of  local birds, the great tit (Parus major) and the blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus).  These birds have shown the ability to learn foods to avoid by watching how other birds react after eating them.  The researchers showed some of the birds videos of their peers eating and reacting to almonds where some of the almonds had been treated with a bitter substance.  Birds who ate those almonds reacted by "wiping their beaks and shaking their heads."  

Birds that had watched the videos ate fewer of the icky prey packets than those that had not, the researchers found. Blue tits seemed to learn better after watching videos featuring members of their own species, while great tits performed similarly regardless of what species had been featured in the videos.

“By watching others, [great tits and blue tits] can learn quickly and safely which prey are best to eat,” Hämäläinen says. “This can reduce the time and energy they invest in trying different prey, and also help them avoid the ill effects of eating toxic prey.”

An Army Of Denialist Bots

A new study of social media site Twitter finds that there is provides a voice to a vast army of automated Twitter bots routinely providing climate change denialist misinformation and expressing disdain and skepticism regarding legitimate climate change science and information.

The social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal. 

The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise.

On an average day during the period studied, 25% of all tweets about the climate crisis came from bots. This proportion was higher in certain topics – bots were responsible for 38% of tweets about “fake science” and 28% of all tweets about the petroleum giant Exxon.

The study doesn't identify the sources behind the bots, but considering their content it seems clear that the goal of the bots is to continue to inject confusion regarding climate science and support the goals of those who wish to delay action on reducing fossil fuel consumption.  Who could have goals like that?