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- www.theguardian.com Nearly 30,000 people in northern California evacuated as raging wildfire spreads
Thompson fire near Oroville destroys homes and vehicles as state simmers in brutal and potentially historic heatwave
Thousands of homes are under threat from a raging wildfire that erupted in northern California on Tuesday, as the state simmers in a brutal and potentially historic heatwave.
Roughly 28,000 residents have been forced to evacuate as the Thompson fire quickly swept across more than 3,500 acres (1,416 hectares) near the city of Oroville, about an hour outside Sacramento, California’s capital.
More than 1,400 fire personnel from across the state have deployed to battle the blaze, which was at 0% containment Wednesday afternoon. Eight injuries have been confirmed by officials, at least half of whom were firefighters, as dangerously high temperatures continue to threaten their health and safety.
“The combination of events has presented a huge challenge for firefighters,” he said, urging the public to take extra precautions to limit new fire starts that can quickly spread crews thin, especially as temperatures spike.
“It’s a tough thing to do,” he said. “You are asking people to hike up a mountain when it’s 108F (42.2C) outside.”
Temperatures in the state capital, Sacramento, were forecasted to reach between 105F and 115F (40.5C and 46.1C) – conditions that could last until Sunday.
“This is going to be a severe, prolonged, potentially record-breaking heatwave that may have large impacts for much of California,” said climate scientist Dr Daniel Swain during a broadcast discussion of the heat event on Monday. The long duration will only add to the potential impacts and intensity, especially because little relief can be expected even after the sun sets. “It just isn’t going to cool off – even at night,” Swain said.
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Socio-Economic Instability and the Scaling of Energy Use with Population Size (2015)
journals.plos.org Socio-Economic Instability and the Scaling of Energy Use with Population SizeThe size of the human population is relevant to the development of a sustainable world, yet the forces setting growth or declines in the human population are poorly understood. Generally, population growth rates depend on whether new individuals compete for the same energy (leading to Malthusian or ...
- surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com #282: Built to order
SCOPING THE COMING CRISIS As you may know, the central contention of the Surplus Energy Economics thesis is the absolute necessity of thinking in terms of two economies. These are the “real” econom…
- www.atlasobscura.com Dozens of Alaska Rivers are Turning an Eerie Orange
The cause is just as concerning as the color.
- brief.bismarckanalysis.com Wind Cannot Power Manufacturing
Heavy subsidies have made wind turbines a growing share of electricity in developed countries. But since wind cannot meet the needs of modern industry, it will contribute to deindustrialization.
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Hurricane Beryl lashes Jamaica as its center brushes past island coast and leaves "Armaggedon-like" destruction
www.nbcnews.com Hurricane Beryl lashes Jamaica as its center brushes past island coastBeryl had winds of 140 mph as it was "‘brushing the south coast of Jamaica," officials said. Its path is uncertain, and Texas warned those on the coast to be prepared.
Beryl lashed Jamaica with strong winds and storm surge and strong waves as the Category 4 hurricane brushed the southern coast of the island Wednesday, officials said.
Beryl had maximum sustained winds of 140 mph when it brushed the Caribbean nation of 2.8 million, and it had 130 mph winds as it approached the southwestern part of the country at 8 p.m., the National Hurricane Center said.
The storm, which had made history as the strongest hurricane ever recorded in July before it was downgraded from Category 5 to Category 4, has been blamed for at least seven deaths as it devastated parts of the Windward Islands and caused flooding and damage in Venezuela.
No deaths have been reported in Jamaica, Prime Minister Andrew Holness said. He said the hurricane was moving quickly, "which is good for us. The quicker it moves, the better."
Hurricane Beryl leaves "Armaggedon-like" destruction
Caribbean leaders are taking to social media in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, sharing shocking images and video of widespread destruction.
Grenada's prime minister described sweeping destruction on the Caribbean nation's island of Carriacou as "almost Armageddon-like," while the prime minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines called the damage to Union Island "a devastating spectacle."
The storm made landfall on the tiny island of Grenada on Monday as a Category 4, wiping out much of the island's electrical infrastructure, homes and agriculture.
"Almost total damage or destruction of all buildings, whether they be public buildings, homes or other private facilities," Grenada Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell said on Tuesday. "Complete devastation and destruction of agriculture. Complete and total destruction of the natural environment. There is literally no vegetation left anywhere on the island of Carriacou."
Carriacou, which means "Isle of Reefs," is just 13 square miles, but it is the second-largest island within Grenada. Hurricane Beryl's size and strength completely overpowered the island, as well as its neighbor, St. Vincent and the Grenadines' Union Island, which saw 90% of its homes severely damaged or destroyed.
- phys.org Extreme temperatures becoming more common in Ireland, study finds
A temperature event of 33 degrees Celsius in Dublin's Phoenix Park has gone from being a 1 in 180-year event in 1942 to a 1 in 9-year event in 2020, according to a study led by Ireland's Maynooth University.
A temperature event of 33 degrees Celsius in Dublin's Phoenix Park has gone from being a 1 in 180-year event in 1942 to a 1 in 9-year event in 2020, according to a study led by Ireland's Maynooth University.
The study, which developed a new model to predict the frequency, magnitude and spatial extent of extreme summer temperature events in Ireland, also estimates that a temperature of more than 34 degrees Celsius—a value not yet recorded in Ireland—changed from a 1 in 1,600-year event to a 1 in 28-year event between 1942 and 2020.
According to Prof Parnell, "We are often focused on average changes, and particularly focus on the Paris Climate Agreement of 1.5 degrees Celsius. What we have shown here is that the changes in extremes are much larger than the changes in the average, and are something we should be seriously concerned about."
He said the findings underscored the urgency for societal adaptation to increasing extreme temperature events, which have profound implications for public health, agriculture, economic stability, and infrastructure resilience. The research team believe that the model's ability to predict spatial patterns of extreme events offers a powerful tool for policymakers and stakeholders to mitigate risks and plan for future climate scenarios.
- yearsofgap.substack.com Are you supposed to be OK right now?- Part 1
Understanding our place on the curve of global overshoot
- www.theguardian.com Life at the heart of Japan’s lonely deaths epidemic: ‘I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried’
Some 68,000 people are expected to die alone and unnoticed in Japan this year, police say, as the population continues to age
We occasionally greet each other, but that’s all. If one of my neighbours died, I’m not sure I would notice,” says Noriko Shikama, 76. She lives alone in a flat Tokiwadaira, in Tokyo’s commuter belt and has come to the Iki Iki drop-in centre to catch up with residents over cups of coffee served by volunteers.
Here, amid the everyday discussions about the merits or otherwise of dyeing grey hair, people also share news about the latest lonely death, or kodokushi – officially defined as one in which “a person dies without being cared for by anyone, and whose body is found after a certain period”.
Almost 22,000 people in Japan died at home alone in the first three months of this year, according to a recent report by the national police agency, about 80% of them aged 65 or older. By the end of the year, the agency estimates that cases of solitary deaths will reach 68,000, compared with about 27,000 in 2011.
Tokiwadaira in the town of Matsudo was the first community forced to confront the distressing phenomenon two decades ago, with the discovery of a man whose corpse had been lying in his apartment unnoticed for three years. His rent and bills had been paid automatically, and his death was noticed only when his savings ran out.
“The economy was booming then, and families were desperate to live here. It was a lively place. But now everyone is getting old,” says Oshima, who moved to Tokiwadaira with her husband and young son in 1961, when the estate was home to 15,000 people.
Now, as Japan’s population continues to age, more people are spending the final years of their lives in isolation. The number of people over 65 living alone stood at 7.38 million in 2020 and is expected to rise to almost 11 million by 2050, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Single-person households account for almost 38% of total households, according to the 2020 census, a 13.3% rise from the previous survey conducted five years earlier.
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Real wealth: Howard T. Odum’s energy economics — Rex Weyler (2017)
www.rexweyler.ca Real wealth: Howard T. Odum’s energy economics — Rex WeylerMoney and market values cannot be used to evaluate real wealth from the environment. – Howard T. Odum In the 1970s, Howard T. Odum explained human economics using ecology and energy fundamentals. His work remains essential for ecologists, who imagine achieving “sustainability.” His 1974 “Energy, E
- animistsramblings.substack.com We are living in the Good Old Days of tomorrow
[ERT: 30 min.] - A (somewhat) unoriginal take on how to stay (somewhat) sane
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Hurricane Beryl Becomes A Category 5; Shattering Record For Earliest Cat 5 by Weeks
weather.com Hurricane Beryl's Next Impact: Jamaica | Weather.comBeryl has had quite a ride, so far. Here's the latest forecast on what still lies ahead. - Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com
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Loneliness Dynamics and Physical Health Symptomology Among Midlife Adults in Daily Life
Abstract
Objective: The current study examined how average daily loneliness (between-persons [BPs]), intraindividual variability in loneliness across days (within-persons [WPs]), and loneliness stability informed physical health symptomatology. Method: We utilized daily diary data from a national sample of 1,538 middle-aged adults (Mage = 51.02; 57.61% women) who completed eight end-of-day telephone interviews about daily experiences, including loneliness and physical health symptoms (e.g., headaches, nausea). Via multilevel modeling, we examined average daily loneliness (BPs), intraindividual variability in loneliness (WPs), stability in loneliness (individual mean-squared successive difference) in association with the number and average severity of daily physical health symptoms. Results: When participants were less lonely on average, and on days when loneliness was lower than a person’s average, they had fewer and less severe physical health symptoms. Additionally, participants who were more stable in loneliness across 8 days had less severe physical health symptoms. Further, there was a stronger association between instability in loneliness and more physical health symptoms for people who were lonelier on average. Finally, the increase in physical health symptom severity associated with WP loneliness was strongest for participants with low variability in loneliness. Conclusion: Loneliness is associated with physical health symptoms on a day-to-day basis, especially for people who are highly variable in loneliness. Considerations of multiple sources of variation in daily loneliness may be necessary to adequately address loneliness and promote health. Public health interventions addressing loneliness may be most effective if they support social connectedness in people’s everyday lives in ways that promote stable, low levels of loneliness.
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Cascading oxygen loss shoreward in the oceans: Insights from the Cambrian SPICE event
Summary
Marine euxinia can amplify phosphorous-limited marine productivity by recycling phosphorous from sediments, creating a feedback loop that increases marine oxygen consumption and ultimately leads to widespread oceanic anoxia. This phenomenon is potentially more dangerous when oxygen loss arises in coastal zones. Here, we present empirical evidence and show that this cascade was set off in the Cambrian Earth system. Carbon isotopes and Mo enrichments in well-dated sediment records from the Steptoean Positive Carbon Isotope Excursion (SPICE) event reveal a rapid decline over 130 ± 30 ka to persistently low Mo levels for 1.0 ± 0.2 Ma, followed by a slower recovery. Using dynamic models for the global biogeochemical cycles, we demonstrate that marine anoxia expanded globally through a self-cascading feedback mechanism. Importantly, we find that the benthic phosphorous flux likely scaled with sedimentation, and that chemocline shoaling into coastal areas likely triggered the SPICE event. We evaluate the risk of passing the tipping point for global-scale anoxia today.
- thehonestsorcerer.substack.com 2019: Peak (Western) Civilization
According to the plot of the movie, The Matrix, robots had won the war on humanity and put each and every one of us into a virtual reality prison; taking our minds back to the “peak of our civilization, 1999”. Based on the data published by the Energy Institute just recently, the Wachowskis were jus...
- www.nature.com Pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in a human fungal pathogen are enabled by mutagenesis induced by mammalian body temperature - Nature Microbiology
Development of pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in Rhodosporidiobolus fluvialis are enabled by mutagenesis induced by mammalian body temperature.
Abstract
The continuing emergence of invasive fungal pathogens poses an increasing threat to public health. Here, through the China Hospital Invasive Fungal Surveillance Net programme, we identified two independent cases of human infection with a previously undescribed invasive fungal pathogen, Rhodosporidiobolus fluvialis, from a genus in which many species are highly resistant to fluconazole and caspofungin. We demonstrate that R. fluvialis can undergo yeast-to-pseudohyphal transition and that pseudohyphal growth enhances its virulence, revealed by the development of a mouse model. Furthermore, we show that mouse infection or mammalian body temperature induces its mutagenesis, allowing the emergence of hypervirulent mutants favouring pseudohyphal growth. Temperature-induced mutagenesis can also elicit the development of pan-resistance to three of the most commonly used first-line antifungals (fluconazole, caspofungin and amphotericin B) in different Rhodosporidiobolus species. Furthermore, polymyxin B was found to exhibit potent activity against the pan-resistant Rhodosporidiobolus mutants. Collectively, by identifying and characterizing a fungal pathogen in the drug-resistant genus Rhodosporidiobolus, we provide evidence that temperature-dependent mutagenesis can enable the development of pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in fungi, and support the idea that global warming can promote the evolution of new fungal pathogens.
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vinay gupta on death by affluence
threadreaderapp.com Thread by @leashless on Thread Reader App@leashless: People love to make this shit complicated. It's a profession. It's not complicated: we're using *far too much stuff* because we have no design discipline for "human satisfaction with minimal footprint" a...…
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Unprecedented' and 'Very Dangerous,' Hurricane Beryl Explodes Into Category 4 Storm
www.commondreams.org 'Unprecedented' and 'Very Dangerous,' Hurricane Beryl Explodes Into Category 4 Storm | Common Dreams"The climate crisis is here. This is an emergency. Politicians need to start acting like it."
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17098218
> "The climate crisis is here. This is an emergency. Politicians need to start acting like it."
- www.forbes.com Supreme Court Corrects EPA Opinion After Gorsuch Confuses Laughing Gas With Air Pollutant
The error came in an opinion blocking an EPA policy meant to improve air pollution.
- www.theguardian.com Canada’s 2023 wildfires created four times more emissions than planes did last year – report
Months-long fires spewed about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647m cars put in the air in a year, data shows
- www.theclimatebrink.com The growing carbon debt
Why the climate change is different from other environmental challenges
- www.theguardian.com Colorado oil and gas wells can’t fund their own cleanup. Taxpayers may foot the bill
A Carbon Tracker report shows the cost to safely shut down low-producing wells is $3bn more than what they earn
- www.nature.com Substantial contribution of slush to meltwater area across Antarctic ice shelves - Nature Geoscience
Analysis of satellite imagery suggests that slush accounts for approximately half of the total meltwater area across Antarctic ice shelves.
Abstract
Surface melting occurs across many of Antarctica’s ice shelves, mainly during the austral summer. The onset, duration, area and fate of surface melting varies spatially and temporally, and the resultant surface meltwater is stored as ponded water (lakes) or as slush (saturated firn or snow), with implications for ice-shelf hydrofracture, firn air content reduction, surface energy balance and thermal evolution. This study applies a machine-learning method to the entire Landsat 8 image catalogue to derive monthly records of slush and ponded water area across 57 ice shelves between 2013 and 2021. We find that slush and ponded water occupy roughly equal areas of Antarctica’s ice shelves in January, with inter-regional variations in partitioning. This suggests that studies that neglect slush may substantially underestimate the area of ice shelves covered by surface meltwater. Furthermore, we found that adjusting the surface albedo in a regional climate model to account for the lower albedo of surface meltwater resulted in 2.8 times greater snowmelt across five representative ice shelves. This extra melt is currently unaccounted for in regional climate models, which may lead to underestimates in projections of ice-sheet melting and ice-shelf stability.
- www.desmog.com The Missing Inner Dimension of System Change
The psychological and cultural aspects of systems change are commonly neglected — but they’re crucial to finding effective solutions to global crises.
>Understandably, material concerns dominate the policy conversation around sustainability and systemic transformation. Yet at the root level, our crises are created and perpetuated by factors in our psychology and meaning—making.
>From consumerist values to evolutionary impulses that skew our perceptions and political behaviours, these inner dynamics subtly dictate the course of our external world. It’s why Donella Meadows, the lead author of The Limits to Growth, saw this arena of “mindsets” as the “deepest leverage point for change.”
- time.com The Coming Great Conflict
Ray Dalio writes about the five big, interrelated forces that drive how domestic and world orders change
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Richard Crim The Crisis Report - 79
richardcrim.substack.com The Crisis Report - 79When it comes to Climate Change, what you SEE depends on who you listen to.
- www.nature.com Continuous sterane and phytane δ13C record reveals a substantial pCO2 decline since the mid-Miocene - Nature Communications
Molecular fossils from marine phytoplankton reveal a substantial decline in CO2 values over the past 15 million years and may support higher climate sensitivity than previously reported.
Abstract
Constraining the relationship between temperature and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (pCO2) is essential to model near-future climate. Here, we reconstruct pCO2 values over the past 15 million years (Myr), providing a series of analogues for possible near-future temperatures and pCO2, from a single continuous site (DSDP Site 467, California coast). We reconstruct pCO2 values using sterane and phytane, compounds that many phytoplankton produce and then become fossilised in sediment. From 15.0-0.3 Myr ago, our reconstructed pCO2 values steadily decline from 650 ± 150 to 280 ± 75 ppmv, mirroring global temperature decline. Using our new range of pCO2 values, we calculate average Earth system sensitivity and equilibrium climate sensitivity, resulting in 13.9 °C and 7.2 °C per doubling of pCO2, respectively. These values are significantly higher than IPCC global warming estimations, consistent or higher than some recent state-of-the-art climate models, and consistent with other proxy-based estimates.
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3rd Year Rising Temperatures Threaten India’s Wheat Production
thediplomat.com Rising Temperatures Threaten India’s Wheat ProductionDecline in wheat production over the past two seasons because of rising temperatures has reduced domestic availability
- www.artberman.com Metacrisis: Getting Honest About the Human Predicament | Art Berman
The world is in metacrisis. That means that many crises are occurring simultaneously and affecting one another. This calls for rethinking the nature of problem-solving. Root causes should be identified rather than merely treating their symptoms. Traditionally, problems have been tackled in isolation...
- surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com #281: The Battle of Little Big Rates
THE LAST STAND OF SOUND MONEY? Words, as we know, change their meanings over time. But at no point in economic history – prior to the global financial crisis of 2008-09 – would anybody have describ…
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The Advanced Economies are headed for a downfall
ourfiniteworld.com The Advanced Economies are head for a downfallThe GDP growth of the Advanced Economies has been falling since the 1960s. Principles from biology suggest the Advanced Economies may come out behind in war
- thehonestsorcerer.substack.com Could We Go Back to the 1950s, Please?
On radical acceptance and energy cannibalism
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Diminished efficacy of regional marine cloud brightening in a warmer world | Nature Climate Change [PDF]
www.nature.com Diminished efficacy of regional marine cloud brightening in a warmer world | Nature Climate ChangeMarine cloud brightening (MCB) is a geoengineering proposal to cool atmospheric temperatures and reduce climate change impacts. As large-scale approaches to stabilize global mean temperatures pose governance challenges, regional interventions may be more attractive near term. Here we investigate the...