Notices by legraLeGra (atthenius@fediscience.org)

#ClimateChange this past year did something odd.

2023 wasn’t supposed to be so hot. #enso El Niño didn’t start until mid year. And yet it was a scorcher.

Gavin Schmidt (my boss) explains why we were all caught +0.2degC off guard.

wasnt hunga tonga ‘22 volcano water vapor

mightve been cleaner shipping fuels… but not all

and so we really dont know what DID happen

YIKES

#GlobalWarming #2023wasSOweird

#nasa #nasagiss #climate #gistemp

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00816-z

Cool #ClimateChange reporting from @alexwitze
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04002-5

Remember all the news ‘hottest day in 125000 yrs’?

During one of such previous 4 interglacial periods — when *annual* global temperatures were lower than today, at least one corner of Greenland was melted - enough to raise global seas by ~½ meter.

The GreenDrill project #LDEO #Columbia uses Cosmogenic Isotopes (like Carbon-14, here Beryllium-10) to determine when parts of Greenland were ice free.

https://greendrill-cosmo.ldeo.columbia.edu

@Brendanjones @SK53

The grounding line in many spots in Antarctica is below sea level: scary :-/

But, given enough time (millennia), the land would ‘rise’ w/o the load of ice on top of it (isostatic rebound*)… but, w/o that ice-load, seas would be 50’s meters-ish higher.

Isostatic rebound: think about it like continents floating on a sea of mantle (so they must have keels)… and ice sheets are like huge foam blocks on top, pushing the whole boat below ‘surface’. That’ll rebound in time.

@CelloMomOnCars

Car/truck pollution causes about 10x the number deaths as violent, bloody deaths caused by cars and trucks in #NYC each year.

“Despite this progress, two air pollutants, ozone and PM2.5, cause about 2,400 deaths per year in NYC, and thousands more emergency department visits and hospitalizations for asthma, heart and lung problems. Those most at risk include older adults, children and people with preexisting health conditions.”
https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/air-quality-air-pollution-protection.page

@inthehands

When I was in college, I heard that the Computer Science dept would only teach Scheme to keep some students from leveraging prior programming language knowledge & teach from scratch.

It turned me off of pursuing CS. I ended up using $matlab$ in college, then (self-taught) FORTRAN once I got into grad school and beyond. And now I have to use python or R to communicate w my students.

If Rice CS had taught C, I would have added is as a major.

So mixed feelings.

@kiwi @inthehands

Communities of color tend to have more roadways and more VMT from (wealthier, non minority) folks passing through (vast AQ EJ lit).
Thus, it is not surprising that majority minority neighborhoods would have more red light tickets issued. But it is unclear the demographics of the person receiving the ticket.

Did propublica get the zip codes / demographics folks being ticketed, or those where the ticket was issued? Latter is simple to get, former not so easy.

@kiwi @inthehands

For safer streets, design changes are preferable over a la carte enforcement - automated or otherwise.