For years, I’ve wanted to get a personal handling on what xº feels like in C. For too long have I used Fahrenheit like a plebeian. I’ve come up empty on a solution for a number of years. Until now! I was googling around the web trying to find a chart from science textbook (or an app or something!). Lo and behold, Mr. Eric Carr saved the day! Thanks Eric. This chart is a lifesaver. A few words from his blog post on Celsius:
For reasons that I’ve mentioned before, I prefer to use SI units whenever possible. For me, it’s about practicality — using SI units makes the math easier, since unit conversion requires few or no “magic numbers” to convert from one unit to another.
A Bloomberg analysis of the use of primary private planes among some of the richest people in the world finds that Musk comes out on top. For example, his private jet took more than twice as many trips as Ellison’s in 2022.
The roughly 2,112 metric tons of greenhouse gas emitted in 2022 from flight’s on Musk’s personal jet — not the Tesla or SpaceX corporate jets — is a tiny fraction of the 8.4 million metric tons that Tesla estimates its customers avoided emitting in 2021. But it’s more than 140 times the average American’s carbon footprint and, to make it up, a Tesla Model 3 would have to replace an average premium internal-combustion car for 7 million miles.
On average, a normal person emits about 4 tons of carbon per year. This asshole contributed over 500x the amount of CO2 in 2022. Some additional context, Musk is infamous for creating problems for himself, micro-manages his teams and can’t seem to figure out teleconferencing. Musk continues to maintain a ridiculous illusion that he truly cares about the environment and is concerned for the future of humanity. It is all a facade. If he truly gave one iota, he could simply adjust his schedule to be more remote-friendly or I don’t know, maybe not take a private flight every day. Musk is and always has self-righteous silver-spooned spoiled piece of of shit.
Measurable climate change has slowly been affecting the coastlines of the Americas for several years now. That’s no secret of course. Rising coastlines, ravaging seas, devastating hurricanes, and superstorms have been battering coastal cities and don’t seem to be letting up. Even, tourist island havens have been completely wiped off the Earth.
It doesn’t end there of course. Even the Southwestern regions are having trouble keeping up with extreme storm systems. We’re nearing hurricane season, and due to a weakened arctic jetstream, we may see more extreme weather phenomena as more “blocking” events become the norm. Think brutal heatwaves and more and more frequent intense winter storms.
All of that is separate from the larger story — year over year climate temperatures since 1972, has risen in steadily here New York. So, as a result, the region has now been reclassified as a sub-tropical climate region. As someone who grew up in Texas, it’s wild that NYC and the Lone Star State have climatological patterns in common. Granted, Texas experienced very long humid summers, while NYC’s summers a tad shorter. But that humidity, is particularly rough.
Here’s more climate types documented across the US:
A sand dam is a thousand-year old technique to collect water in arid regions. It has a surprisingly simple design that is constructed of rubble and cement. It has incredible agricultural benefits and can be constructed with very little ecological impact.
A practical construction revolves around flood-prone or low-lying drainage areas that are dry in the off-season. During the rain seasons, they flood, so re-capturing these drainage systems are key. However, they should be permeable enough to allow for water to flow downstream for collection from sand — which if erected correctly can allow for water to be filtered of debris and in some cases very little water treatment will be necessary:
Rainwater harvesting is integral to transforming agricultural yields and staying alive in regions where water can be scarce. The RAIN Foundation put together a wonderful PDF which has thoughtful construction methods, research and material recommendations. You can download the PDF here.
By one estimate, there’s about eighty trillion dollars of money on the planet. If that’s correct, then BlackRock’s holding of seven trillion dollars means that nearly a dime of every dollar rests in its digital files, mostly in the form of stocks it invests in for pension funds and the like. So when BlackRock’s C.E.O., Larry Fink, devoted his annual letter to investors to explaining that climate change has now put us “on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” it marked a watershed moment in climate history.
He’s right about the financial future, of course—one can’t look at the clouds of smoke now obscuring the Australian continent and come away thinking that we can maintain our present course. But anyone paying attention—which includes investment-fund C.E.O.s—has known the score for years. What’s changed now are a couple of factors.
This is impressive, and Larry Fink is completely right. “Climate risk is investment risk,” as he states in his letter. If we don’t start acting right now — we might not have an opportunity later. It begins here, with the reshaping of how we invest. Taming the river of money, will make considerable waves in the future.
It wasn’t that long ago that CEO’s and leaders from blue-chip giants of the Business Roundtable were meeting to redefine the responsibility companies should play in society. There’s serious momentum, for the first time in nearly a century to re-think and re-model companies, businesses, and Wall Street — from the top-down. We’re entering an era where leadership is finally understanding just how important it is to put money where it matters most: engaging on middle-class wealth, diversity/inclusion and perhaps most importantly, environmental protection.
The last cooler than average month on planet Earth was February 1994.
If you're 25 or under you've never experienced a month of normal. You've essentially been living on an alien planet your whole life. pic.twitter.com/hxIgSHMR3s
It was only two days ago that the New South Wales Rural Fire Service warned the developing bushfires were growing in intensity and would generate its own weather system. Unfortunately, these bushfires were growing far too quick to be contained. In turn, these sorts of weather patterns become a repeating cycle: fires, wind, thunderstorm, lighting, and repeat.
The Amazon fires had roughly 2.2M hectares burned, the 2019/2020 Australia Bushfire has burned 5.9M hectares so far. It’s a bit mind-blowing to draw a comparison between two very large numbers. The destruction of wildlife alone is enough to make your stomach churn, and the video really communicates the devastation:
Most of the pictures of these bushfires and the pyro-cumulonimbus (sometimes referred to as cumulonimbus flammagenitus) cloud formations are really intense:
Pyro-cumulonimbus clouds have developed to altitudes over 16km in East #Gippsland this afternoon. These fire-induced storms can spread fires through lightning, lofting of embers and generation of severe wind outflows #VicWeather#VicFirespic.twitter.com/gZN6sC7meU
As global temperatures rise, pyrocumulus clouds may become more common. A similar fire-induced weather system took place during California’s wildfire season in 2018. The state’s hilly terrain created perfect conditions for not only thunderstorms, but fire tornadoes. An unprecedented number of wildfires in north Russia and the Arctic Circle in the summer of 2019, as captured by satellite images, contributed to an increase in lightning strikes in the North Pole.
It’s pretty rare to come across shards of optimism nowadays. The internet has made me (and probably you too) quite the skeptic. However, this quick-cut of audio lifted from the After On podcast, features an interesting take on climate change from Stewart Brand, Editor of the Whole Earth Catalog.
The theory goes: if it wasn’t for climate change, we, as in the entire planet, would not be discovering our shared humanity and climate change might be the catharsis for planetary unity. I’m not convinced that level of realization will happen over night, but I am hopeful that it could happen in our lifetime. We’ll see…
As Hurricane Dorian drew near to the Abaco Islands in the northwestern Bahamas early Sunday morning, the National Hurricane Center said in a bulletin that the maximum sustained winds around the eye of the storm had reached 160- miles an hour, making it a “catastrophic” storm with “devastating winds.”
It is moving westward fairly slowly — 8 miles an hour — and would soon be moving over Grand Abaco. The bulletin said storm surge as much of 15 to 20 feet was possible, enough to swamp many low-lying areas of the islands, and that as much as 24 inches of rain could fall before the storm passes.
This is pretty much a nightmare scenario. A storm originally forecast as a Category 3 or 4 has strengthened to a Category 5 in the balmy warm waters just south of The Bahamas. A weak jet stream, and unusually high temperatures of the waters have only strengthened the storm as it slowly creeps toward The States.
The devastating wind and sustained rain is going to pummel the tropical islands before reaching Florida on September 2, Labor Day at 2am. The NWS precipitation forecast says it all:
Another way to read this table — in nearly a a century of record-keeping, roughly 30% of all Category 5 hurricanes have been recorded since the New Millennium.
As Hurricane Dorian quickly approaches, it’s time to revisit the hurricane forecast maps. We often forget that these storms are highly complex systems, that can grow and contract and can move across hundreds of miles fairly quickly. Shouldn’t our weather projection maps communicate that complexity? Perhaps, that’s a tall order. As an primer, this was the forecast projection map for Hurricane Maria in 2017:
The great tragedy of these sorts of maps, is they communicate a very compressed amount of uncertainty. The paths these hurricanes can take can vary wildly around small meteorological variables. They’re simple and offer a condensed overview of the uncertainty of the storm (over time) without the baggage of demystifying a map legend and fraying model paths. While the cone projection maps condenses information, the spaghetti projection map illustrates the ensemble of projections:
Studies show that some people misinterpret the map as indicating the hurricane getting bigger over time. Others think it shows areas under threat. Research by Hurakan, a University of Miami team I’m a part of, suggests 40 percent of people wouldn’t feel threatened if they lived just outside of the cone.
The NWS does publish wind projection maps. Again, we’re looking at Hurricane Maria, which easily illustrates the destructive wind speed that pummeled Puerto Rico along its path in 2017:
It’s instrumental to look at all the projections available to you, to collectively assemble a full picture of the storm ahead. This method of forecasting multiple models (known as ensemble forecasting) isn’t new either. It’s regularly used for tornado and severe storm predictions as well.
Fires raging in vast stretches of the Amazon rainforest this week are darkening the skies of cities thousands of miles away, turning rainwater black, and setting disturbing records, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, better known as INPE. The agency, which uses satellite imagery to monitor fires in the world’s largest rainforest, said this week that the Amazon is burning at the fastest rate since 2013, when it began keeping records.
The 72,843 fires in Brazil this year mark an 84 percent increase over this time last year, with INPE recording a new fire somewhere in the country roughly every minute.
As images of wildfires in South America’s Amazon region draw global attention, a large and potentially devastating series of fires is raging in Central Africa and parts of Southern Africa.
Among the regions at risk is the Congo Basin forest, the second-largest tropical rainforest, after the Amazon, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The region absorbs tons of carbon dioxide, a key in the fight against climate change, and has been called the world’s “second lung,” following the Amazon.
Take a good, hard look at the graph and caption below.
This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Luthi, D., et al.. 2008; Etheridge, D.M., et al. 2010; Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.) Find out more about ice cores (external site).
Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.
If that doesn’t scare the living hell out of you, allow my hyperbolic language for a moment — we don’t have a lot of time left on the clock. Last time I checked, there’s only one Earth. Maybe, start giving a shit. At this rate, humankind will be in grave danger in less than 50 years times. This is not up for debate. Contact your member of Congress or the Senate. Ask him or her to support climate legislation immediately. Find a member of the House here and a member of the Senate here. Most importantly, go vote.
Looking for more tips on reducing your carbon footprint or fighting climate change? Here’s some further reading:
