Notices by Julian Oliver (julianoliver@mastodon.social), page 2

Incredible image.

No need to paraphrase. First paragraph says it all:

"Claims that artificial intelligence will help solve the climate crisis are misguided, with the technology instead likely cause rising energy use and turbocharge the spread of climate disinformation, a coalition of environmental groups has warned."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/07/ai-climate-change-energy-disinformation-report

Antarctic research expedition, comprised of Aotearoa New Zealand and Italian scientists, finds sea ice melting at rate far faster than expected.

"The changes to the sea-ice indicate that in the coming decades coastal cities will need to be reconfigured because of sea level rise." - Dr. Craig Stevens, leader of NZ research team.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/510696/signs-found-of-worryingly-fast-antarctic-ice-melt-new-zealand-expedition

As anticipated, it looks like we've officially failed the Paris Agreement, and so thereby future generations of all life.

Yes, "we", because we all played a part in that outcome, some vastly more than others of course - the rich countries in particular.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/509936/humanity-marks-first-year-under-a-1-point-5c-rise-eu-climate-service

Good coverage of an interesting new paper looking at how "ancient drives" for social status, tribal belonging, & attracting a mate have been co-opted and exploited by marketers to engineer behaviours that are incompatible with a sustainable world.

Positioning this as the "root cause" of our planetary overshoot, they assert there is no viable future for our species without behavioural change, change that can be just as engineerered but with a habitable planet in mind.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/13/human-behavioural-crisis-at-root-of-climate-breakdown-say-scientists

“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed [...] Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”

- James Hansen, former Nasa scientist now at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/29/world-will-look-back-at-2023-as-year-humanity-exposed-its-inability-to-tackle-climate-crisis

Al Gore is a tad more blunt. From the dumpster fire formally known as Twitter:

"COP28 is now on the verge of complete failure. The world desperately needs to phase out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, but this obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word. It is even worse than many had feared. It is “Of the Petrostates, By the Petrostates and For the Petrostates.”"

Dr Bill Hare, the climate scientist and chief executive of Climate Analytics, who has been to 27 Cops in person, says of the draft text at COP28:

"Iwould say it’s giving every fossil fuel exporter on the planet everything they need to expand fossil fuel production. They might not say it, they might have crocodile tears, but I think any country involved in exporting coal, oil or gas would be privately very happy.”

(Source: The Guardian)

And precisely as warned, by myself and a ton of people more studied than I in this space, it is carbon capture & storage tech that the petrostates have latched onto at COP28. It has become the License to Pollute, the 'moral hazard' scholars warned of. Saudi Arabia is leading the charge to say the issue is not with FF, but FF emissions, which it says it will simply capture. And yet we have no CCS system in operation that is remotely close to gigaton capable. Tech saviourism at its absolute worst.

We are together alive at an incredible time. We are witnessing the decisive sabotage of the fundamental right to a habitable planet, the homeworld every cell in our bodies has evolved to thrive within. We are witnessing the active, conscious choice to cast the world into centuries of compounding suffering and chaos, as the Hothouse Earth scenario takes hold, so a tiny handful of people can hoard more money than they already have, right up until the point money ceases to matter.

Badges signalling 'AI free content'.

https://notbyai.fyi/

Has it really come to this.

Incredible landscape. Hotels and high rises in the seaside resort city of Acapulco, Mexico, after Hurricane Otis hit.

Photo: AFP/ Rodrigo Oropeza

A tyranny of so many map projections is that they distort area in favour of preserving shape and distance, the Mercator Projection being perhaps the most well known. Such distortion can visually inflate some regions, a power of its own.

And so I have been especially enjoying playing with this map tool by Josh Horowitz that maintains area/scale across two views as you zoom and pan:

https://joshuahhh.com/projects/same-scale/#3.73/55.96/-6.27/-40.60/173.20/Map

Here is my home country of Aotearoa New Zealand, compared to both Japan & the UK.

Very useful list, The Eight Stages of White Settler-Colonial Denial.

This very process is playing out with precision to this day in countless colonised lands, as seen recently with the Indigenous Referendum in Australia, in right wing and center-right political rhetoric in LATAM countries, North America, and sadly also here in Aotearoa New Zealand

Excellent short article by an ecologist on how the biophysical demands we have placed on this planet make 'degrowth' inevitable, whether we like it or not.

"Access to fossil fuels has allowed us to temporarily overshoot biophysical limits. This lifted our population and demands on the biosphere past the level it can safely absorb. Barring a planned reduction of those biosphere demands, we will experience the same "adjustments" as other species."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/495938/critics-of-degrowth-economics-say-it-s-unworkable-but-from-an-ecologist-s-perspective-it-s-inevitable

The IPCC said the Gulf Stream System wouldn't collapse this century. New analysis suggests it could occur as early as 2025, if not in the coming decades, on our current trajectory. Shutdown of the Atlantic circulation system (Amoc) is one of the primary planetary boundaries which scientists agree we must never cross "At all costs".

“This would be a very, very large change. The Amoc has not been shut off for 12,000 years.” - Prof Ditlevsen, University of Copenhagen

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests

Hitachi HDD: Z7K320-250 / 250GB / SATA 3.0Gb/s.
Data erasure method: 50lb Longbow, two arrows at 15 yards.

@mastohost @RyunoKi @emanuele @aral Recently tootctl cleared 330GB on one of the instances I sysadmin, all content cached from federated nodes.

Very pleased to share Per Million, a website and protest tool by @gordan and I about the most defining number of our time https://permillion.live #permillion