Politicians don't do enough about climate because there is a time scale mismatch between election cycles and tangible results of climate policies.
A politician can say: "Look, I fixed the pothole!" But she can't go to the voter and say: "Vote for me; I saved the climate." That transcends generations of election cycles.
We need politicians who think about humanity and the living world instead of the next election.
A big news day for 4 of the 5 men in this photorealistic painting of SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas and friends Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo (who is now linked to Thomas and wife Ginni in a just-published Washington Post report) and Mark Paoletta, who acknowledged publicly that Crow paid for years of boarding school tuition for Thomas' grand-nephew that he was raising as a son.
#ClarenceThomas #HarlanCrow #LeonardLeo #SCOTUS #SupremeCourt
The latest from @ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-tuition-martin-school?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post
Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire: SCOTUS Justice Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From Major GOP Donor
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Island-hopping on a superyacht.
Private jet rides around the world.
The undisclosed gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the Supreme Court.
“It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” says one former judge.
New paper day:
Just published in @NatureAstronomy, a study by @sandorkruk et al. on the increasing impact of satellite trails on Hubble & other low-Earth orbit space observatories.
We found a doubling in the number of trails per image from 2002–2021, with a significant rise of ~50% in 2021 alone, as the "megaconstellations" started to appear.
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Harnessing the power of citizen science and machine learning, this study takes in 20 years of Hubble Space Telescope images, of which 2.7% show satellite streaks, and predicts that this fraction will increase by up to an order of magnitude in the next decade.
I showed my students this movie of how atmospheric #CarbonDioxide (CO₂) travels around the globe and you should see it too.
Narrated video - Jan. 1, 2006 - Dec. 31, 2006For complete transcript, click here. Visualization - Jan. 1, 2006 - Dec. 31, 2006 North America - Feb. 1 - 28, 2006 Africa - Aug. 1 - 31, 2006 Himalayas - Feb. 1 - 28, 2006 Still image - Jan. 1, 2006 Still image - North America - Feb. 12, 2006 Visualization without annotation - Jan. 1, 2006 - Dec. 31, 2006 An ultra-high-resolution NASA computer model has given scientists a stunning new look at how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere travels around the globe.Plumes of carbon dioxide in the simulation swirl and shift as winds disperse the greenhouse gas away from its sources. The simulation also illustrates differences in carbon dioxide levels in the northern and southern hemispheres and distinct swings in global carbon dioxide concentrations as the growth cycle of plants and trees changes with the seasons.The carbon dioxide visualization was produced by a computer model called GEOS-5, created by scientists at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office.The visualization is a product of a simulation called a “Nature Run.” The Nature Run ingests real data on atmospheric conditions and the emission of greenhouse gases and both natural and man-made particulates. The model is then left to run on its own and simulate the natural behavior of the Earth’s atmosphere. This Nature Run simulates January 2006 through December 2006.While Goddard scientists worked with a “beta” version of the Nature Run internally for several years, they released this updated, improved version to the scientific community for the first time in the fall of 2014. For More InformationSee [http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/a-closer-look-at-carbon-dioxide/#.VGpHfC9by7s](http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/a-closer-look-at-carbon-dioxide/#.VGpHfC9by7s) Related pages
We investigate the sensitivity of a universe's nuclear entropy after Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) to variations in both the baryon-to-photon ratio and the temporal evolution of cosmological expansion. Specifically, we construct counterfactual cosmologies to quantify the degree by which these two parameters must vary from those in our Universe before we observe a substantial change in the degree of fusion, and thus nuclear entropy, during BBN. We find that, while the post-BBN nuclear entropy is indeed linked to baryogenesis and the Universe's expansion history, the requirement of leftover light elements does not place strong constraints on the properties of these two cosmological processes.
The main thing that makes it hard to have nature and green in cities isn’t density of buildings or density of people — it's density of cars. And the better you design your density of people and buildings, the fewer cars you need or want.
This is really important.
Car dependency is the opposite of freedom. It takes away our choices & leaves us trapped — & I don’t just mean trapped in traffic. Plus it’s massively expensive, time & space consuming, mentally & physically unhealthy, anti-social, & future-ruining.
Put THAT in a car commercial.
David Ho
wet forest moon folklorist
Chris Morran
ProPublica
Mark McCaughrean
Prof Stephen Serjeant
Brent Toderian
Prof Julia Steinberger 🌍🌹🌱