…I think it has something to do with how our brains are wired…we generally don’t mistake a threat of the order of, say, a stampede of woolly mammoth headed our way…but…slow it down…&…somehow…we just can not get out of our own way?

The record-shattering heatwaves, wildfires and floods destroying lives in the US, Europe, India, China and beyond in 2023 have raised an alarming question: have humanity’s relentless carbon emissions finally pushed the climate crisis into a new and accelerating phase of destruction?
[…]
The scientists told us that, despite it certainly feeling as if events had taken a frightening turn, the global heating seen to date was entirely in line with three decades of scientific predictions. Being proved right was cold comfort, they said, as their warnings had so far been largely in vain.

Increasingly severe weather impacts had also been long signposted by scientists, although the speed and intensity of the reality scared some. The off-the-charts sea temperatures and Antarctic sea ice loss were seen as the most shocking.

The feeling of entering a new age of devastation was the result of the return of the natural El Niño phenomenon, which has temporarily turbocharged global heating, they said. Another factor was many people being confronted with extreme weather they had never experienced before, as climate impacts began to clearly stand out from usual weather.

The scientists were clear the world had not yet passed a “tipping point” into runaway climate change, but some warned that it got ever closer with continued heating.
[…]
The scientists also warned that the “crazy” extreme weather of recent months was just the “tip of the iceberg” compared with the even worse impacts to come. In just a decade the exceptional events of 2023 could be a normal year, unless there is a dramatic increase in climate action. Some further warned that the tendency of climate models to underestimate extreme weather meant we were “flying partially blind” into a future that could be even more catastrophic than anticipated.

However, a “tiny window” of opportunity remained open to tackle the climate crisis, they said, with humanity having all the tools needed. The researchers overwhelmingly pointed to one action as critical: slashing the burning of fossil fuels down to zero.
[…]
“[Global] warming is remarkably steady, and that’s bad enough,” said Prof Michael Mann, of the University of Pennsylvania, US. “There is no reason to invent an ‘acceleration’ that isn’t there to make the case for urgency. The impacts of warming make the case for urgency.”
[…]
The current level of extreme weather impacts boded ill for the future as emissions continued to be pumped into the atmosphere, the scientists said. “Unfortunately, these new records will not last. Global warming will push records into the unknown sooner rather than later,” said Dr Raúl Cordero, until recently at the University of Santiago, Chile.

“July has been the hottest month in human history and people around the world are suffering the consequences,” said Prof Piers Forster, of the University of Leeds, UK. “But this is what we expected at [this level] of warming. This will become the average summer in 10 years’ time unless the world cooperates and puts climate action top of the agenda.”

Many of the scientists were blunt about our future prospects. Prof Natalie Mahowald, of Cornell University, US, said: “What we are seeing this year is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, of what we expect to happen.” Meinshausen said: “If we do not halt global warming soon, then the extreme events we see this year will pale against the ones that are to come.”
[…]
While the scientists were clear that overall global heating was playing out as predicted, their views on whether the extreme weather impacts were hitting faster and harder than expected were more varied as they encompassed a wider range of factors.

“The impacts are frighteningly more impactful than I – and many climate scientists I know – expected,” said Prof Krishna AchutaRao, of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Prof Francisco Eliseu Aquino, of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, said: “I have also been scared by these extreme events in the last weeks and months. They are more intense and going beyond what we expected for this decade.”

“My expertise is in heatwaves, and I’m not surprised most of the northern hemisphere has had heatwaves this summer, but the intensity is greater than I expected,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, an associate professor at UNSW. “We are hitting record-breaking extremes much sooner than I expected. That’s frightening, scary and concerning, and it really suggests that we’re not as aware of what’s coming as we thought we were.”

Others thought the extreme weather events were mostly within the realm of predicted impacts, but were still stunned. “Some of the extreme events, such as heatwaves on land and in the oceans, have been pretty shocking even for the scientists who have been expecting this to some extent,” said Prof Andrea Dutton, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US.
[…]
Mann said: “There is a misconception, however, that these extreme weather events constitute some sort of ‘tipping point’ that we’ve crossed. They don’t. They are tied directly to the surface warming, which is remarkably steady aside from temporary fluctuations due to things like El Niño.”
[…]

Dr Christophe Cassou, a CNRS researcher at Université Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, in France, said: “Changes in hazards have not been underestimated at global scale, though some of the heat extremes are in the upper-range of the anticipated outcomes. But the impacts have been underestimated because we are much more vulnerable than we thought – our vulnerability is smacking us in the face.”

“We have the impression that extreme heat is hitting us sooner and with greater intensity because of our unpreparedness,” Cassou added. “Our perception is also biased by the fact that we are living more often in uncharted territory, which gives a sense of acceleration. We now feel climate change that is emerging above usual weather.”

Dr Pep Canadell, of CSIRO Environment in Australia, said: “Climate extremes are becoming more widespread, so we talk more about it and it feels like it is coming faster than we thought.”

“I do think we are hitting a tipping point in global consciousness,” said Prof Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “For years I’ve spoken about the challenge of psychological distance: when people are asked if they are worried about climate change, they say yes; but then when asked if it affects them, they say no. That barrier is falling very quickly as nearly everyone can now point to someone or somewhere they love that is being affected by wildfire smoke, heat extremes, flooding, and more.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/28/crazy-off-the-charts-records-has-humanity-finally-broken-the-climate

…so

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/28/kroger-worker-dies-heat-temperature

…that sounds “fun”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/28/dramatic-climate-action-needed-curtail-extreme-weather

…good job the rest of the news is

U.S. and China Agree to Broaden Talks in Bid to Ease Tensions [NYT]

…oh

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/illegal-logging-takes-big-toll-mexico-citys-crucial-forests

…wait

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/first-ugandan-charged-aggravated-homosexuality-punishable-death

…no

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alabama-wants-1st-state-execute-prisoner-making-breathe-only-nitrogen

…that mostly seems to suck, too

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/openai-launches-chatgpt-enterprise-companys-biggest-announcement-chatgpt

…something, something

Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’ [WaPo]

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/tesla-braces-first-trial-involving-autopilot-fatality

…”shoot the messenger”?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/case-highland-park-shooters-father-signing-gun-application-can-continue

…or is it a matter of platform?

Félix “xQc” Lengyel and Kaitlyn “Amouranth” Siragusa were two of Twitch’s biggest stars. Between them, they amassed nearly 20 million followers on Twitch alone. But in June, both left the streaming giant for lucrative contracts with a rival platform, Kick, which boasts looser moderation policies and practices. They left amid an exodus of popular Twitch creators that continues despite criticism over the personalities Kick has attracted and reports that it has ties to gambling industry figures and influencers.

Since Amazon acquired Twitch for $970 million in 2014, the platform has enjoyed a near-monopoly on the US streaming market. Business especially boomed during the pandemic. According to The Verge, hours watched jumped 50% from March to April 2020 and 101% year over year. By May 2020, it had reached 1.645 billion hours watched per month. 

While most partnered streamers split their subscription revenue 50/50 with Twitch, some of its biggest creators cut more lucrative 70/30 deals.

But the platform sparked a furor in September when it revealed it would strip some of those streamers of their 70/30 cuts. 
[…]
Enter Kick. The fledgling platform launched eight months ago, backed by gambling industry heavyweights Bijan Tehrani and Ed Craven, the co-founders of Stake.com, an online casino based in Australia, and Tyler “Trainwreck” Niknam, a popular gamer and gambler. Its concept bears a striking similarity to Twitch’s, with one major exception: It offers streamers a whopping 95/5 revenue split.  A spokesperson for Kick called the split “simple back-of-napkin math for any serious Twitch Creator tired of handing over 50% of their subscription dollars to Twitch.” 
[…]
And they are not the only streamers to have left Twitch. In recent months, popular Fortnite streamer Tyler Blevins — known to fans as “Ninja” — and chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura have also joined Kick, bringing their followers with them.
[…]
In a post on X, Twitch’s former director of creator development, Marcus “djWheat” Graham — who is now the vice president of community development at Fortis Games — called Kick “a sham.” 

“There are so many red flags present that it is embarrassing watching people who I respect give this platform an ounce of credibility,” he said, pointing specifically to the lack of transparency around the platform’s reported connections to crypto gambling.

 Subcategories for streams featuring “Slots and Casinos” remain prominently displayed on the front page of the site — even after Craven reassured users last month that the platform would remove “some unnecessary exposure” to such content. 
[…]
“They don’t call themselves a gaming company, and they’re not a gambling company,” he said. “It looks like YouTube, but it also looks like PlayStation 5, but it also looks like Las Vegas.” 

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitch-kick-streamer-gambling-deals

…getting the practice in line with the theory is…not straightforward at the best of times…which these do not particularly advertise themselves as being?

Traditional geothermal plants, which have existed for decades, work by tapping natural hot water reservoirs underground to power turbines that can generate electricity 24 hours a day. Few sites have the right conditions for this, however, so geothermal only produces 0.4 percent of America’s electricity currently.

But hot, dry rocks lie below the surface everywhere on the planet. And by using advanced drilling techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, some experts think it’s possible to tap that larger store of heat and create geothermal energy almost anywhere. The potential is enormous: The Energy Department estimates there’s enough energy in those rocks to power the entire country five times over and has launched a major push to develop technologies to harvest that heat.
[…]
Fervo is using fracking techniques — similar to those used for oil and gas — to crack open dry, hot rock and inject water into the fractures, creating artificial geothermal reservoirs. Eavor, a Canadian start-up, is building large underground radiators with drilling methods pioneered in Alberta’s oil sands. Others dream of using plasma or energy waves to drill even deeper and tap “superhot” temperatures that could cleanly power thousands of coal-fired power plants by substituting steam for coal.
[…]
Still, the growing interest in geothermal is driven by the fact that the United States has gotten extraordinarily good at drilling since the 2000s. Innovations like horizontal drilling and magnetic sensing have pushed oil and gas production to record highs, much to the dismay of environmentalists. But these innovations can be adapted for geothermal, where drilling can make up half the cost of projects.
[…]
States like California are increasingly desperate for clean energy sources that can run at all hours. While wind and solar power are growing fast, they rely on fossil fuels like natural gas for backup when the sun sets and wind fades. Finding a replacement for gas is an acute climate challenge, and geothermal is one of the few plausible options.

There’s a Vast Source of Clean Energy Beneath Our Feet. And a Race to Tap It. [NYT]

…& these may have all the efficacy of an apple a day

There was a time not so long ago when preventing epidemic disease was a cause ordinary people embraced and celebrated. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on Americans to join the fight against polio, for instance, he reported that envelopes containing “dimes and quarters and even dollar bills” arrived by the truckload at the White House, “from children who want to help other children to get well.” The March of Dimes went on to fund the development of polio vaccines. When one of them, the Salk vaccine, proved effective, in April 1955, church bells rang out nationwide.

Likewise, in the mid-1960s, when the World Health Organization announced its wildly ambitious plan to eradicate smallpox in just 10 years, people rose to the challenge. Small teams bearing vaccines and a simple lancet called the bifurcated needle were soon moving through the afflicted parts of the planet — by camel across the desert in Sudan, by elephant to ford rivers in India, and by all the more familiar modes of travel. People everywhere lined up to get the peculiar dimpled mark of smallpox vaccination, freeing them from the scourge that had been maiming and killing their families for as long as they could remember.

As many as 150,000 men and women at a time worked on the campaign, and with a final naturally occurring case discovered in Somalia in October 1977, they eradicated smallpox in the wild. For veterans of the “order of the bifurcated needle,” as they called themselves, it was the proudest hour of their lives.

It may seem unlikely that we could ever recapture that determination and excitement about standing up together against a deadly disease. Instead of presenting a unified front against Covid-19, we fought bitterly, and three years on, our shared response seems to be a shellshocked unwillingness to even think about epidemic diseases.

Politicians have become particularly skittish about what ought to be common-sense steps to protect basic public health. The Pasteur Act, for instance, would address the antibiotic resistance crisis that threatens our entire system of medical care, but it’s been stalled in Congress for years. Funding for federal pandemic preparedness programs comes up for reauthorization in September, but its passage is in doubt.

Given the catastrophic losses caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, this type of inaction is baffling. Are emerging and evolving pathogens too elusive a target? Is the political payoff for these actions too small? Is the desperate desire to move on from the nightmare of the pandemic leading us to avoid the difficult realities of prevention?

I believe that the way to ease us as a nation back into the essential business of preventing infectious diseases is by focusing on pathogens we already know perfectly well, and for which we have new tools to reduce or eliminate sickness worldwide. I’m thinking in particular of the very winnable fights against three diseases with a long history of maiming, crippling and killing humans: tuberculosis, malaria and polio.

The dark star of the three is tuberculosis. We haven’t seen it much in the developed world since the arrival of antibiotic therapies in the 1940s, but as Covid deaths wane, tuberculosis has resumed its place as the deadliest infectious disease, killing some 1.5 million people a year, mostly in the developing world. The ability to cut that number dramatically is within our reach. The development of diagnostic technologies like GeneXpert has brought testing times for TB down from weeks to hours — a crucial difference because at present, 40 percent of TB victims don’t get diagnosed or treated. This failure doesn’t just put people at risk, it also spreads the disease to those around them.
[…]
As with so many infectious diseases, lack of determination is the real stumbling block. The United States and other donor nations could argue that we already do more than our share, contributing billions annually to the fight against TB and other infectious diseases. But donors still fall short by more than half on the funding the W.H.O. says it needs to end the TB epidemic by 2030. Until we get the job done, we need to have a broader sense of what “our share” could yet entail: Up to 13 million Americans currently live with latent TB infection, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The realities of modern travel mean that none of us is protected from a TB resurgence until we have protected people everywhere.

It’s the same story with malaria, which used to sicken and kill Americans as far north as the Great Lakes until a well-funded federal initiative protected us. Consciously or otherwise, we then set malaria aside as a “Third World” disease. In June, however, for the first time in two decades, homegrown malaria cases turned up in Texas and Florida, raising the specter that it might again become endemic in the United States.

That ought to serve as a reminder that an estimated 247 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide in 2021, and 619,000 people died. The vast majority of them were children under the age of 5 in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Malaria prevention has stumbled at times because of rapidly evolving resistance to drugs and insecticides. But we are now making major progress with a variety of new tools and a more coordinated and agile response.

Sixteen nations, from El Salvador to China, with efforts coordinated by the World Health Organization, have eliminated malaria since 2000, with another 10 countries aiming to stamp it out in the next two years. Moreover, public health agencies for the first time now have a vaccine against malaria, and about 1.7 million young children across three countries in Africa — Ghana, Kenya and Malawi — have already received at least one dose since the start of a pilot program in 2019. The vaccine is only moderately effective, but by preventing about 40 percent of cases of Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest malaria variety, it’s expected to save tens of thousands of children every year. With proper funding to develop other necessary tools and get them into the field, the W.H.O. goal for this decade is to drive the annual malaria death toll down to well under 100,000 — en route to eradication.

Polio, finally, offers the most immediate opportunity for a major success over infectious disease. In 1988, when international agencies, national governments and nonprofits launched an eradication campaign, polio was still endemic in 125 countries and every year paralyzed an estimated 350,000 people, mostly young children. This year, there have been just seven cases of wild poliovirus, all in one small, mountainous area on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two countries where the virus remains endemic. Both countries are now cooperating to stop it. They have eliminated wild poliovirus from major cities and Taliban-dominated regions where it was still circulating just a few years ago. Border crossings between the two countries now require polio vaccination. And vaccination teams, often with women taking the lead, routinely travel to remote and sometimes dangerous border villages to finish the job.

We Thought We’d Beat These Three Diseases, but They’re Still Killing Us [NYT]

…funny how that shit works out

These misperceptions can arise, he said, when people don’t research climate solutions closely or attach outsize importance to actions that seem simple, such as getting rid of plastic straws. There have also been efforts from industry to mislead consumers about what is most effective, he added.

People tend to overestimate the climate benefits of recycling. One study led by a researcher at the University of Leeds placed recycling second-to-last among more than 50 actions people can take to reduce their carbon footprint.

That’s also not to say these measures don’t have other benefits — recycling can help the environment by reducing waste, and switching to an electric stove can improve indoor air quality. However, that doesn’t make them climate solutions.
[…]
Among the 10 actions Americans were polled on, experts said flying less and cutting out meat and dairy are among the best steps people can take. Most Americans don’t realize that — 51 percent say flying less would make a little or no difference, and about three-quarters say the same for cutting out meat and dairy.
[…]
“If everyone in America had an energy audit and spent a few hundred dollars at Home Depot on a programmable thermostat and a little bit of caulk, that would be worth a couple of nuclear power plants worth of energy,” Foley said.
[…]
Americans have grown less confident that their individual actions can reduce the effects of climate change. In 2019, 66 percent said they could personally make a difference, a number that has fallen to 52 percent this year, with the sharpest declines among Republicans and independents.

Some experts say those feelings are not unfounded. Individual actions can only go so far, said Field. “The most important thing anybody can do is to vote for a climate-friendly government agenda,” he said.

You’re doing it wrong: Recycling and other myths about tackling climate change [WaPo]

…but one man’s bombshell is another damp squib to those who don’t wanna hear it

Eastman’s defense is shattered in state bar proceeding [WaPo]

[…yes, mccarthy is still shilling the line that impeachment proceedings aimed at joe are a natural & proportionate response to a big bunch of both-sides false equivalence…if anybody happens to be counting]

You’ve probably heard the cheerful quotes: Winston Churchill, with his “success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”, or CS Lewis, who wrote “failures are finger posts on the road to achievement”. What about Billie Jean King, who enthused “losing a tennis match isn’t failure, it’s research”? Maybe you find yourself thinking, “Sure. Easy to say when you’re famous and successful.”

For most people, failure is pretty simple: it’s bad, even shameful. Life is going well if you’re not experiencing failures, and we think that avoiding failure is obviously the right goal. We worry about what it says about us when we get something wrong (we’re not good enough!). The social stigma of failure exacerbates that spontaneous reaction.

The instinct is so strong that we can find ourselves upset about the smallest missteps – the comment that falls flat in a meeting, the stumble on an uneven sidewalk that has us furtively glancing around to see if anyone noticed. Add to these timeless anxieties the never-ending chore of self-presentation in our age of ubiquitous social media. Countless studies find today’s teens obsessed with putting forward a sanitised version of their lives, endlessly checking for “likes”, and suffering from comparisons and slights, real or perceived.

And it’s not just the kids. Whether related to our professional accomplishment, attractiveness, or social life, keeping up appearances can feel as necessary as breathing to many adults. Rationally, we may understand that failure is an unavoidable part of life, a source of learning, and even a requirement for progress in science and technology, yet emotionally and practically, it’s hard to experience it that way.

But what if we could learn to habitually reframe failure as a source of discovery and personal development? What if we could face problems and setbacks with honesty, determination and a healthy sense of realism? What if failure, as a token of our shared humanity, provided us with feelings of inclusion, not ostracism?

This is exactly what people like me, who study this kind of thing, argue is the right approach. We’ve questioned and pushed back against habitual ways of thinking about failure for quite some time now – even to the extent of advocating for increasing the frequency of failures in projects and workplaces around the world. You read that correctly. In our lives, and in our organisations, most of us would benefit from experiencing more failures, not fewer.

…handy…what with all the practice we seem on course for getting

Many of today’s medical miracles – such as open-heart surgery to repair diseased vessels and valves – were once the impossible dreams of pioneers. Without their willingness to tolerate and learn from intelligent failures along the way, most of the life-saving advances we now take for granted would not exist. As cardiologist Dr James Forrester wrote: “In medicine, we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.” But the truth of Forrester’s statement does little on its own to make it easy for the rest of us to navigate failure’s painful side effects.

Fortunately, failing well can be learned. We can replace fear and shame with curiosity and growth. To facilitate this shift, it helps to recognise the human tendency to play in order not to lose, which holds us back from new challenges – and choose instead to play to win. Playing to win comes with the risk of failing, but it also brings rewarding experiences and novel accomplishments.

I’m not advocating that we embrace stupid mistakes or shrug our shoulders at preventable accidents. Failing well is about increasing the frequency of intelligent failure where the upside more than compensates for the downside. Take the blind date that falls short. Perhaps a friend, for reasons you both thought sensible at the time, thought you’d like each other. You agreed to meet for a coffee, only to discover that your friend was wrong. Was the failed date a waste? No, it was research, with minimal risk and definitive results.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/28/the-big-idea-why-we-need-to-learn-to-fail-better

…speaking of handy…if any of these work for you, I’d have to imagine they’d qualify?

The world is full of advice on how to get a good night’s sleep, but sometimes doing so just isn’t possible. If you are struggling with a sleep disorder, are a shift worker or have a toddler who wakes every few hours, being told how to sleep well can be galling. For others, despite feeling knackered all day, a fourth episode of The Bear can seem more appealing than going to bed.

How do you know if you are sleep-deprived? For some people, the answer will be obvious; for others, it may be less so. Russell Foster, a professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford, specifies three signs that you are probably not getting enough sleep: “Feeling that you don’t perform at your peak during the day; oversleeping on free days; or craving a nap during the day.”

Guy Meadows, the founder of the Sleep School, suggests you ask yourself: “Do I wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, with enough energy to go about my day effectively, to perform tasks and have a relatively stable emotional outlook on the world?” According to Meadows, most of us could do with an extra hour to an hour and a half of sleep each night.

Thankfully, there are things you can do to help you cope.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/aug/28/tired-grumpy-self-medicating-with-kitkats-and-coffee-heres-how-the-experts-handle-sleep-deprivation

…either way

Stable U.S.-China economic ties are ‘profoundly important,’ Raimondo says [NBC]

State and federal lawmakers are pushing to regulate foreign ownership of U.S. real estate because of fears that Chinese entities are creating a national security risk by amassing swaths of U.S. farmland, some of it near sensitive sites.

A review by NBC News of thousands of documents filed with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, however, shows very few purchases by Chinese buyers in the past year and a half — fewer than 1,400 acres in a country with 1.3 billion acres of agricultural land. In fact, the total amount of U.S. agricultural land owned by Chinese interests is less than three-hundredths of 1%.

But the review also reveals a federal oversight system in which reporting of foreign ownership is lax and enforcement minimal.

Any foreign individual or entity that buys or leases U.S. agricultural land is required by federal law to report the transaction to the USDA within 90 days, yet some were not reported for years — in one case, more than 20 years. And in that same time period, no one has been fined more than $121,000 for failure to make such a report.

NBC News was able to review filings on foreign purchases and leases of agricultural land, meaning both farm and forestry land, from 35 states since Jan. 1, 2022. The vast majority of the transactions were European wind power companies leasing land from U.S. farmers to build wind turbines. One Italian wind company disclosed 40 new leases of farmland in just one rural Illinois county. The same company had leases in at least four other states.

In those 35 states, NBC News found 11 purchases by Chinese entities that had been reported to the USDA from Jan. 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023.

Several of the disclosures were not recent sales, and at least one was a repeat of a previous disclosure. Another was not reported to the government till it had been revealed in the media.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/how-much-us-farmland-china-own

…that’s another funny one, isn’t it…how the people paying to live &/or work in a place & the people who own the place are seldom the same people?

https://whoownsengland.org/2017/10/28/who-owns-central-london/

…but that’s about enough out of me…or I’ll start in on the cases upon cases or something

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/18/donald-trump-what-how-many-criminal-charges

…I dunno…you hum it & I’ll try to catch the tune?