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Eve Sedgwick

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(via It’s a Vast, Invisible Climate Menace. We Made It Visible. - The New York Times)

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'Things are getting unstable': global heating and the rise of rockfalls in Swiss Alps | World news | The Guardian

A 10-minute drive from Davos, which hosts the World Economic Forum each year, Marcia Phillips, a scientist at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, gets out of her car and looks at the Flüela Wisshorn. About 300,000 tons of rock fell off the mountain in March.

“It was very lucky that it happened during the night, because it is a very popular route with ski touring, so it could have easily killed several people,” she says.

Reports of the rockfall reached the scientists a few hours after the event because it is popular with tourists and close to a road. But most rockfalls happen in remote areas where nobody takes note, and very few can be surveyed and studied. On-site measurements of the unstable Piz Cengalo, for example, would simply be too dangerous. What’s certain, Phillips says, is that there have been more reports of rockfalls.

“At the moment we have the impression that a lot more is coming down,” she says, “and things have definitely got unstable.”

The reasons are complex. The structure of the mountain and the way it eroded over millennia play a role, as does the warming climate. In the past 120 years, temperatures in the Alps have risen by just under 2C – twice the global average.

“Climate change has a direct effect on the ice masses and the retreating glaciers,” says Andreas Bauder, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich. Glaciers, he explains, contribute to the stability of the Alps both because they can support rock and because they protect the mountains from precipitation. If water seeps into the mountain, that can lead to erosion – and rockfalls.

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One Shot Ten Years After | James Balog Photographing Climate Change from Nikon

At the start, in 2007, there were 25 Nikon cameras—D200s and D300s—in time-lapse rigs on glaciers around the world, placed to document one of the effects of global warming. Today there are 43 cameras—D5300s and D3200s, for the most part—at 24 sites.

Along with the 25 original cameras that took the pictures for that story were battery packs, voltage regulators, intervalometers, light sensors and solar panels. The cameras were able to shoot during daylight hours for eight months, then switch to two- or five-frames-per-day for the short months of the year. When the EIS crew checked the cameras, the memory cards were pulled and replaced.

The images captured were of disappearing landscapes. "The landscapes we're recording are going to be gone," Jim said at the time. "I pull out the flash card, and I realize the memory of that landscape exists only on that card. I'm holding in my hand the evidence of its existence."

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Simon Norfolk’s traumatic photos capture a Swiss glacier on life support - Los Angeles Times

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"Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613630/training-a-single-ai-model-can-emit-as-much-carbon-as-five-cars-in-their-lifetimes/

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On Capitol Hill Thursday, NOAA’s acting chief, Neil Jacobs, said that interference from 5G wireless phones could reduce the accuracy of forecasts by 30 percent. That's equivalent, he said, to the quality of weather predictions four decades ago. “If you look back in time to see when our forecast scale was roughly 30 percent less than today, it was 1980,” Jacobs told the House Subcommittee on the Environment. That reduction would give coastal residents two or three fewer days to prepare for a hurricane, and it could lead to incorrect predictions of the storms’ final path to land, Jacobs said. “This is really important,” he told ranking committee member Frank Lucas (R-Oklahoma).

https://www.wired.com/story/5g-networks-could-throw-weather-forecasting-into-chaos/

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RangerBot: Programmed to Kill | Hakai Magazine

Russ Babcock, who studies COTS management at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, is optimistic about RangerBot’s potential to expand sea star control efforts into deeper, less accessible waters and gather high-quality data on corals and sea stars to inform current management. “I believe these things have a place in the toolbox of marine ecologists, and we’re getting closer and closer to the day when mere marine ecologists like myself can operate one without getting a robotics jockey to come along. Bring it on,” he says.

One day, fleets of RangerBots may autonomously monitor vast areas of the Great Barrier Reef, Babcock says, complementing current monitoring systems and arming reef managers with better data.

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Just as we took the physical stability of the planet for granted, I think we are much more sanguine about whether or not human meaning is taken for granted. If climate change marks the end of nature, these technologies mark the end of human nature

@billmckibben https://twitter.com/brittwray/status/1120468206752337921?s=20 (via stml)

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Eco-fascism is undergoing a revival in the fetid culture of the extreme right | Jason Wilson | World news | The Guardian

Contemporary eco-fascists are inspired by a number of key figures. One is “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, whose terrorist campaign against what he called “industrial society” combined violence, misanthropy and a self-dramatising manifesto. Kaczynski’s apocalyptic account of a doomed, destructive civilisation – further expounded in his voluminous prison writings – and his willingness to act as a self-appointed executioner of his adversaries is a central inspiration for the would-be terrorists in the eco-fascist movement.

Some, including Hanrahan, claim that the Netflix drama, “Manhunt: Unabomber”, aided the growth spurt of contemporary eco-fascism.

Another figure who gets a lot of play in contemporary eco-fascist circles is Finnish deep ecologist writer Pentti Linkola, who openly calls for an end to immigration, the reversion to pre-industrial life ways, and authoritarian measures to keep human life within strict limits.

Linkola is responsible for one of the starkest presentations of so-called “lifeboat ethics”, the idea that in the context of ongoing environmental collapse, some people should simply be allowed to die.

“What to do,” Linkola writes in Can Life Prevail, “when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”

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Alby on Twitter: "Yikes. I am never closing the window in my classroom again. After 1½ hours CO₂ concentration was over 2300 ppm, where 1400 "can impair cognitive functioning"

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The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America - The Verge

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The rumour mill appears to have created a feedback loop, where news coverage of the Momo challenge is prompting schools or the police to warn about the supposed risks posed by the Momo challenge, which has in turn produced more news stories warning about the challenge. Tremlett said she was now hearing of children who are “white with worry” as a result of media coverage about a supposed threat that did not previously exist. “It’s a myth that is perpetuated into being some kind of reality,” she said.

Viral 'Momo challenge' is a malicious hoax, say charities | Technology | The Guardian

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Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis | Sea ice data updated daily with one-day lag

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I would say that, right now, the core powerful capitalist societies are in fact telling developing and poor countries what to do about all kinds of things. But their general encouragement—whether it’s through financial policy or trade policy or military bases or what have you—tends to be in the direction of locking in fossil-fuel extraction and consumption. There is no way around the fact that the U.S. government has played a major role in building, reinforcing, and protecting the global oil industry—Saudi Arabia is just the best-known illustration. What Geoff and I would point to instead, as an alternative to imperialism, is a lot more old-fashioned transnational solidarity on behalf of ordinary people all over the world, in the name of climate justice. That’s what we desperately need. On this point about transnational, trans-class solidarity and climate justice, it might be worth taking a look at Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si, which has probably been, to my mind, the most important book on these questions in my lifetime. In a series of statements that Pope Francis makes in that text, he reconfigures Catholic theology as a process of forging a planetary solidarity for humanity, in a world still to come. O.K., we’re not Catholics. Geoff and I aren’t directly quoting Francis and saying, “You see, the Pope has it all figured out,” but we’re basically stretching and pointing in the same direction.

How Governments React to Climate Change: An Interview with the Political Theorists Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann | The New Yorker