Notices by Wolfgang Lucht (w_lucht@mstdn.social)

A book by Australian historian Christoph Clarke describes the blindness, ideological miscalculations and nationalist delusions that led to the outbreak of World War I.

It's called "The Sleepwalkers".

When the history of our times will be written, the title will be: "The Arsonists".

A US administration that bars journalists from press conferences, attacks the judiciary, rules by decree rather than laws, releases convicts from jail who attacked congress, ignores science, fights inclusion, spreads lies about elections - lectures Europe on democracy and values.

It's not weakness to invest in people rather than the military. That'll likely have to change now, but not because it's good.

The US are better than this.
Time to organise - Europe has 450 million people.

More than 200.000 people protesting in Munich against the current right shift in politics, the far right and anti-immigrant fervour - as in other cities across Germany.

Something telling I notice, deeply disappointing I have to say, is how some leaders of Germany's conservative party - likely to lead Germany's next government - have been reacting to these demonstrations also against their flirtations with the illiberal hard right: with notable derision and contempt. That says a lot.

This web page at NASA hasn't been purged yet, as many others have been suspended, according to widespread reports.

It's still clear about facts every human needs to know.

I worked quite a bit for NASA thirty years ago. They were building their "Mission to Planet Earth (MPTE)", later renamed the "Earth Observing System (EOS)". Renamed because, under huge budget pressures, they figured back then it would be harder to scrap "science" than a "mission". I guess that wouldn't be true today.

Just because vigorous growth is the magic bullet of most political discussion right now:

Growth is a core element of nature, too.
But not unchecked growth.
In civilization, it's called governance.

We need to govern a selected number of key harmful material exchange processes between our societies and nature: such as of CO2, N, P, water, aerosols, poisons; and space: deforestation, habitat destruction.

Six of nine planetary boundaries are transgressed. Our paper:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

💥 Out today! Our report to the German government on "Sufficiency as a Strategy of the Enough'" (in German).

Building ecological civilization is necessary for two reasons:
1. The transgression of six of nine planetary boundaries can't stand. This requires that we govern critical flows of matter through society.
2. The gross injustices we see in the access to and use of environmental resources can't stand.

Both strongly suggest a strategy of sufficiency.

https://www.umweltrat.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/04_Stellungnahmen/2020_2024/2024_03_Suffizienz.html

@umweltrat

Now why is it, in my opinion, that nuclear still isn't dead and buried in 🇩🇪? I think there are two reasons:
1) a general desire/hope in the public for large-scale tech 'solutions' where nobody has to change anything in their lives
2) aggressive business interests/big players fighting to keep centralised, semi-monopolised, state-subsidized energy systems rather than transitioning to more distributed, networked systems based on renewables, where profits flow more to other actors.

3/4

The zombie debate in Germany about nuclear energy ☢️ just won't die. There's a parliamentary inquiry going on these days, driven by the opposition's claim that Germany's exit from nuclear on grounds of public safety and cost were ideologically motivated (while forgetting that it was their gvmt who put the exit from nuclear into law after Fukushima showed the enormous potential for uncalculated disasters). And so the debate, facts barely mattering, again spills into the public (see ⬇️).

1/4

Too rarely mentioned: 🇩🇪's 1st commercial nuclear plant went online in 1961. To this day, 64 yrs later, 🇩🇪 does NOT have a safe repository for its nuclear waste. It's in temporary containment - all of it. The search for a permanent storage site, itself fraught with problems upon problems, is not expected to yield a result before the 2040ies (massive protests incoming no matter where it'll be placed).

Btw, Bavaria's PM, railing against nuclear exit, rules out his state taking nuclear waste.

2/4

The chalk cliffs of the Baltic island of #Rügen's Jasmund peninsula are ancient. I took this pic last week.

They're made of the microscopic remnants of tiny organisms that thrived in the light-flooded shallow seas of the late Cretaceous, 70 million years ago.

We humans, homo sapiens, arrived a mere 300.000 years ago. We're but a speck in time.

It's up to us, whether we overwhelm our planet's ecological heritage with our greed. And whether we spend our time with compassion and empathy.

The candidate for Germany's demagogic hard right, nationally polling in 2nd place, today gave an acceptance speech that was pure hate and aggression. In structure and content it was fascist.

Against Europe. Against climate science. Against human solidarity. For Russia. For exploitation of nature. For nationalist racism.

An alien observing from space would comment:
How can incredible stupidity be displayed so prominently?

I sure hope the 80% other Germans send a clear "get lost, never again".

The university I'm a prof with (otherwise I work at a non-uni climate research institute), Humboldt University Berlin - Berlin's oldest university - has *finally* left the hellsite today, alongside 60 other institutions of higher learning.

Unfortunately, they're not (yet!?) turning to mastodon - the one social media option with no algorithm, no ads, no tracking, and distributed federation. They remain on meta.

It's sth how many of my colleagues remain inactive in the fediverse, prefer bsky.

"Inevitably, there are those who demand impartiality from scientists, but being impartial doesn’t mean not telling the truth; it doesn’t mean playing down threats; and it certainly doesn’t mean keeping silent at a time of global emergency."
Well-known climate scientist Bill McGuire and campaigner Roger Halam in an opinion piece in today's Guardian, "Scientists prize neutrality – that doesn’t cut it any more. In 2025, they must fully back the climate movement".

I agree.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/09/planet-dying-climate-crisis-emergency-scientists

I think Germany should purchase Kansas from the US. It's in the national interest, of course, Germany needs a foothold in North America. I'm sure Trump will understand. They also say that the good people of Kansas would bigly like to be members of the EU.

The speed with which many in the media are now normalizing the hard right is remarkable (or maybe not). Even those who spent months on Trump and his European allies ticking all the authoritarian boxes are now discussing their illiberal plans as debatable suggestions. It's mostly not straight-forward sycophancy but subtle arrangement in wording and tone. A new portrayal of liberal ideas as weak rather than as the very basis of our societies is creeping in. It's frighteningly spineless.

A slim sickle of Moon was dancing with bright Venus in the winter evening skies tonight.

As the "world endures 'decade of deadly heat'" ... let's keep in mind that it's just the beginning of a development that will get much worse. How far it will be allowed to go depends on us.

We know what to do, but overall don't. So next time politicians and business leaders suggest to be "realistic", let's not be distracted.

My problem as a scientist is that the answer the world needs is a work of art.

"Musk is becoming a one-man rogue state", writes Alexander Hurst in The Guardian. "He has bankrolled elections, stoked riots and ignored laws".

But as he finds we need to "show that even interplanetary amounts of wealth don’t mean impunity, and that some things – like democracy – are not for sale", we'd do well to remember he's just the tip of an iceberg. The idea that deregulated big business growth models benefit all is being pushed by many, while it destroys ecological & social foundations.

Nearly 1 million Syrians live in Germany today, having fled from war and suppression (along with 1.2 million Ukrainians & 400.000 Afghans). Their hopes for a better future for Syria must be high, a future on par with its potential and ancient wisdom. But they know that uprooting a despot is just a first step, so very hard to achieve. Things can very quickly go very wrong from there. So let's remain firm in our solidarity with their difficult situation. If we were more open, we'd learn from them.