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When I first saw "The Newsroom" clip, after I stopped laughing, I thought I would dust off my science chops to get to the bottom of that sea level question. It wasn't too hard—it took about an hour and a half to get confident about the current state of the science, which is based on paleoclimate proxy data. Years ago, when I still thought there was a point to things, I used to read paleoclimate stuff all the time.
I see that Aaron Sorkin's "end of the world" video (the one I linked to) has gotten up to 6,963 views, which is higher than any of the others (there are now at least 4 different copies on youtube). This is not exactly what I would call going viral. I didn't expect much, of course, and I almost always get what I expect—"almost" because some outcomes are actually worse than I expected
Have a nice holiday, bearing in mind that we're not going to get 80 feet of sea level rise anytime soon, and you will be long dead by the time Washington D.C. is under water.
And isn't it an exceedingly cheerful thought that this splendid event will eventually come to pass?
Having finished Part III, and as I contemplate Part IV, which will be short, I ran across another instructive example of what Flatland is all about. I am referring to yet another book about the human prospect called Adventures in the Anthropocence by science journalist Gaia Vince. I will quote from the Salon interview. Here is Lindsay Abrams' introduction to that give & take.
The Anthropocene: Don’t worry about trying to pronounce it. Don’t even worry about whether or not geologists decide we've officially entered it. This is the Age of Man: the epoch of mass extinction, of rapidly acidifying oceans and of unprecedented climate change – transformation on a planetary scale, all of which we’ve brought on ourselves.
Gaia Vince, formerly the editor of the journal Nature and the magazine New Scientist and a current editor at the journal Nature Climate Change, has been seeing this all play out for years; for some added perspective, she took an 800-day trip around the world, encountering places where humanity’s influence on the planet is already abundantly evident – and where humans are trying to redirect that influence into something more favorable.
Problem-solving in the Anthropocene is a monumental task: If people aren’t moving mountains yet, Vince at least documents cases where they’re painting them, and, in Nepal, connecting them to WiFi. They’re creating artificial glaciers in Ladakh, using electrical currents to restore coral reefs in Bali and, back in New Jersey, trying to create artificial trees that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere much more effectively than their natural counterparts.
Vince, in other words, is an optimist. Or, to put it better, she believes in humanity’s power to change their world – for better or for worse.
The problems of the Anthropocene may be dire, and they’re definitely unequal, she tells Salon, but we have innovation on our side.
I'm in a posting mood. This mood won't last, so I'm striking while the iron is hot.
Anyway, as I was looking around the intertubes this morning, I ran across this item at Zerohedge, which is not a favorite website of mine because the anonymous posters over there are doomer attention whores who rarely document their stories. Zerohedge is the Huffington Post for pessimists.
But this article made some good points and had a few working links to outside sources. Mostly the article had internal links to other Zerohedge crap, like this broken one to the WSJ "source" of the graph below.
"Tyler Durden" (sigh) noted that millennials (those under 35) have a negative savings rate, which means, in the long run, they're even more fucked than they know. This is from WSJ Source, which took me 15 seconds to find.
After a flirtation with thrift after the recession, young Americans have stopped saving.
Adults under age 35—the so-called millennial generation—currently have a savings rate of negative 2%, meaning they are burning through their assets or going into debt, according to Moody’s Analytics. That compares with a positive savings rate of about 3% for those age 35 to 44, 6% for those 45 to 54, and 13% for those 55 and older...
“In the very near term it’s a plus for spending and economic growth, but in the long run these households are not saving, and that will impair their ability to spend in the future,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics who calculated the numbers with Moody’s economist Mustafa Akcay.
Let me ask a simple question:
Is it too much to expect that humans use the internet the way it was intended to be used?
Yes, it is too much to fucking expect because documenting stories isn't compatible with greed. If you leave the Zerohedge website, you won't see the intrusive advertising slathered all over it.
But I digress.
Zerohedge did manage (accidentally?) to include a working link to a pre-election message to millennials from Hopey-Changey himself (i.e., it had his byline). This is some fine bullshit, so let's quote it.
Another meaningless election was held yesterday. Well, OK, it was meaningless for regular folks. As Andy Borowitz reminds us, it wasn't meaningless for those hoping to prosper from the result.
WASHINGTON —Congressional seats are on pace to fetch a whopping four billion dollars on Tuesday night, a record-smashing sales figure that has exceeded the expectations of even the most optimistic insiders.
The seats, which include four hundred and thirty-five in the House of Representatives and thirty-six in the Senate, have attracted buyers from a broad spectrum of industries, including investment banking, energy, pharmaceutical, and gun.
Continue reading "Exit Poll Offers Fleeting Glimpse Of Reality" »
