#berkeley earth

[sudden-stops-kill]

[doomrichards]

But the brute's a killer, prof! But he's also--my friend!"

Counter-Earth DoomReed from Warlock (1972) #6-7 "The Brute!" - "Doom: At the Earth's Core!"

[peteneems]

[xtruss]

Improving Climate Predictions By Unlocking The Secrets of Soil Microbes

— By Julie Bobyock, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | February 5, 2024

Overview of DEBmicroTrait. Credit: Nature Microbiology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41564-023-01582-W

Climate models are essential to predicting and addressing climate change, but can fail to adequately represent soil microbes, a critical player in ecosystem soil carbon sequestration that affects the global carbon cycle.

A team of scientists led by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a new model that incorporates genetic information from microbes. This new model enables the scientists to better understand how certain soil microbes efficiently store carbon supplied by plant roots, and could inform agricultural strategies to preserve carbon in the soil in support of plant growth and climate change mitigation.

"Our research demonstrates the advantage of assembling the genetic information of microorganisms directly from soil. Previously, we only had information about a small number of microbes studied in the lab," said Berkeley Lab Postdoctoral Researcher Gianna Marschmann, the paper's lead author.

"Having genome information allows us to create better models capable of predicting how various plant types, crops, or even specific cultivars can collaborate with soil microbes to better capture carbon. Simultaneously, this collaboration can enhance soil health."

This research is described in a new paper that was recently published in the journal Nature Microbiology. The corresponding authors are Eoin Brodie of Berkeley Lab, and Jennifer Pett-Ridge of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, who leads the "Microbes Persist" Soil Microbiome Scientific Focus Area project.

Seeing the Unseen: Microbial Impact on Soil Health and Carbon

Soil microbes help plants access soil nutrients and resist drought, disease, and pests. Their impacts on the carbon cycle are particularly important to represent in climate models because they affect the amount of carbon stored in soil or released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide during the process of decomposition.

By building their own bodies from that carbon, microbes can stabilize (or store) it in the soil, and influence how much, and for how long carbon remains stored belowground. The relevance of these functions to agriculture and climate are being observed like never before.

However, with just one gram of soil containing up to 10 billion microorganisms and thousands of different species, the vast majority of microbes have never been studied in the lab. Until recently, the data scientists had to inform these models came from only a tiny minority of lab-studied microbes, with many unrelated to those needing representation in climate models.

"This is like building an ecosystem model for a desert based on information from plants that only grow in a tropical forest," explained Brodie.

The World 🌎 Beneath Our Feet 🦶��

To address this challenge, the team of scientists used genome information directly to build a model capable of being tailored to any ecosystem in need of study, from California's grasslands to thawing permafrost in the Arctic. With the model using genomes to provide insights into how soil microbes function, the team applied this approach to study plant-microbiome interactions in a California rangeland. Rangelands are economically and ecologically important in California, making up more than 40% of the land area.

Research focused on the microbes living around plant roots (called the rhizosphere). This is an important environment to study because, despite being only 1-2% of Earth's soil volume, this root zone is estimated to hold up to 30-40% of Earth's carbon stored in soils, with much of that carbon being released by roots as they grow.

To build the model, scientists simulated microbes growing in the root environment, using data from the University of California Hopland Research and Extension Center. Nevertheless, the approach is not limited to a particular ecosystem. Since certain genetic information corresponds to specific traits, just as in humans, the relationship between the genomes (what the model is based on) and the microbial traits is transferable to microbes and ecosystems all over the world.

The team developed a new way to predict important traits of microbes affecting how quickly they use carbon and nutrients supplied by plant roots. Using the model, the researchers demonstrated that as plants grow and release carbon, distinct microbial growth strategies emerge because of the interaction between root chemistry and microbial traits.

In particular, they found that microbes with a slower growth rate were favored by types of carbon released during later stages of plant development and were surprisingly efficient in using carbon—allowing them to store more of this key element in the soil.

The Root of the Matter

This new observation provides a basis for improving how root-microbe interactions are represented in models, and enhances the ability to predict how microbes impact changes to the global carbon cycle in climate models.

"This newfound knowledge has important implications for agriculture and soil health. With the models we are building, it is increasingly possible to leverage new understanding of how carbon cycles through soil. This in turn opens up possibilities to recommend strategies for preserving valuable carbon in the soil to support biodiversity and plant growth at scales feasible to measure the impact," Marschmann said.

The research highlights the power of using modeling approaches based on genetic information to predict microbial traits that can help shed light on the soil microbiome and its impact on the environment.

[reasonsforhope]

As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.

Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.

The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.

With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”

Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”

Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...

To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.

During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.

On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.

As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”

LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.

So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.

-via Wired, February 19, 2024

[hope-for-the-planet]

From the article:

“Texas has the most solar and wind of any state, not because Republicans in Texas love renewables, but because it’s the cheapest form of electricity there,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a climate research nonprofit. The next top three states for producing wind power — Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are red, too. [...] “You picture a web, and we’re taking scissors or a machete or something, and chopping one part of that web out,” said Elizabeth Sawin, the director of the Multisolving Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes climate solutions. “There’s this resilience of having all these layers of partners.” All told, climate progress has been unfolding on so many fronts for so many years — often without enough support from the federal government — that it will persist regardless of who occupies the White House. “This too shall pass, and hopefully we will be in a more favorable policy environment in four years,” Hausfather said. “In the meantime, we’ll have to keep trying to make clean energy cheap and hope that it wins on its merits.”

[willgrahamscock]

Nightingales in literature can symbolize so much, which is why I think 'A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square' isn't just Crowley & Aziraphale's song. It's repeatedly presented to us in little easter eggs or outright such as Crowley telling Aziraphale that there are no nightingales singing. This of course is a reference to the song at the end of the novel, they dined together at the Ritz and a Nightingale sang for the first time in Berkeley Square.

Nightingales symbolize love, their song is described as 'The Voice of God' In folklore, it is seen as a messenger between the divine and the human world, which means Nightingales connect Aziraphale and Crowley in a very significant way, two divine beings on earth falling in love. We can take this to mean that "No Nightingales" is Crowley telling Aziraphale that he's cutting off their connection if he goes to heaven.

In the Bible it represents a faithfulness to God, the Nightingale singing is a sign of hope during times of despair.

So, "You hear that?" ... "I don't hear anything." "That's the point. No Nightingales."

No hope.

[anarchistettin]

The graph below, created by Hausfather, a researcher at the climate group Berkeley Earth, shows temperature anomalies, meaning how high each month was above a historical average baseline temperature. Each multicolored line represents a previous year, color coded by decade. (The 1990s, for example, are the lines in yellow.) The solid black line is 2023, and it has been soaring above the others since May. It stops in the month of September, which beat the prior monthly record by more than 0.5° Celsius.

[starks-kid]

okay, so here's my good omens season 3 bingo, but its a list cause it was too long (and very chaotic):

1) aziraphale's statue on earth

2) Queen's 'love of my life' at any point

3) crowley's fall flashback as the first scene

4) shades of gray

5) toast 'to us'

6) 'do that again'

7) AZIRAPHALE DANCING THE I WAS WRONG DANCE

8) and flashbacks from his previous dances (1650, 1793, 1941)

9) and an actual apology with actually saying 'i am sorry'

10) aziraphale finally going with a worse insult than 'bad angels' (BONUS POINTS IF IN FRONT OF CROWLEY!)

11) muriel with wings, cause i think it would be adorable <3

12) god's narration is back. and her somehow intervining/talking with aziraphale or crowley

13) will we finally get aziraphale calling crowley "my dear"?!? just so sweetly and tenderly that everyone will melt

14) picnic in a garden ("it stars, as it will end, with a garden")

14) NO BEARD AZIRAPHALE

15) azira reading documents on crowley in heaven

17) there's not enough time, but newt and anathema returning would be awesome

18) 'look at you, youre gorgeous' but to azira this time

19) an agressive 'i love you' from crowley

20) long hair crowleyyyy

21) that 1941 photo

22) third part of the 1941 minisode

23) aziraphale's diary

24) rooftop scene from s2 intro

25) flashback with azira and crowley fem presenting (but for hells sake, not with different actors!)

26) more of crowley and muriel interactions. i love these two so muchhh

27) paralell to the conversation about making nina and maggie fall in love

28) them kissing to "a nightingale sang in berkeley square", more specifically to:

'And as we kissed and said goodnight

A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square'

PLEASE. THAT WOULD BE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL CLOSING SCENE

29) muriel wearing their own human outfit

30) crowley (drunkenly) crying in the bookshop. or in the bentley

im really hoping at least some of these will happen. anyways, thanks for reading my ramblings

[anumberofhobbies]

Jupiter: 10 Years of OPAL Observations by NASA Hubble Space Telescope Via Flickr: Hubble's sharp images track clouds and measure the winds, storms, and vortices, in addition to monitoring the size, shape, and behavior of Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) storm. Hubble follows as the GRS continues shrinking in size and its winds are speeding up. OPAL data recently measured how often mysterious dark ovals — visible only at ultraviolet wavelengths — appeared in the "polar hoods" of stratospheric haze. Unlike Earth, Jupiter is only inclined three degrees on its axis (Earth is 23.5 degrees). Seasonal changes might not be expected, except that Jupiter's distance from the Sun varies by about 5% over its 12-year-long orbit, and so OPAL closely monitors the atmosphere for seasonal effects. Another Hubble advantage is that ground-based observatories can't continuously view Jupiter for two Jupiter rotations, because that adds up to 20 hours. During that time, an observatory on the ground would have gone into daytime and Jupiter would no longer be visible until the next evening. These two views of Jupiter showcase the wealth of information provided by the spectral filters on the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) science instrument. At left, the RGB composite is created using three filters at wavelengths similar to the colors seen by the human eye. At right, the wavelength bounds are widened beyond the visible range to extend just into the ultraviolet (UV) and infrared regimes. Humans cannot perceive these extended wavelengths, but some animals (such as mantis shrimp, whose eyes function similarly to certain sensors on some NASA missions) are able to detect infrared and ultraviolet light. The result is a vivid disk that shows UV-absorbing lofty hazes as orange (over the poles and in three large storms, including the Great Red Spot), and freshly-formed ice as white (compact storm plumes just north of the equator). Astronomers, including the OPAL team, use these filters (and others not shown here) to study differences in cloud thickness, altitude, and chemical makeup. For more information: science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-celebrates-... Image credit: NASA, ESA, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael H. Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) Find us on X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

[thisisawonderfulusername]

it's just us now

crowley x demon!reader x aziraphale

requested by: @cool-iguana

summary: after aziraphale leaves, you and crowley must move on.

warnings: sad :( but also comfort

a/n: i had to jump between writing this and a different fic because this was making me sad and the other was basically me kicking my feet while i giggled. that will be out soon:) for now, enjoy

you stood beside crowley's bentley, staring in silence across the street. crowley stood on the other side of the car, also unable to utter a word.

aziraphale entered the elevator that would bring him back to heaven, and you couldn't do anything but stare. your eyes had been glossed over, as if a painter had brushed on their protective coating on a finished painting. 

the car felt as if it was your grounding object. it was the only physical thing letting you know that you're here- that crowley is here. he's not leaving you too. you'll still have crowley.

part of you was hoping that your angel would change his mind. that as he took a short glance at the two of you that he would come back to you, back to his bookshop.

that you could all be together on earth, on your own side.

but his words repeat in your head, like a broken record.

"nothing lasts forever."

after the doors close, you clear your throat, forcing yourself to keep from crying. 

"well, i suppose it's just us now." you say softly, opening the passenger door and falling into your seat. 

as crowley gets into his own seat, he remains quiet for a moment. when he starts the engine, the radio began to play a nightingale sang in berkeley square.

as he swiftly turns it off, you sniffle. "we should've known being with an angel wouldn't work."

your voice is quiet, but in the silence of the car it seems so loud. 

crowley nods somberly, placing his hand over yours.

"we should've known."

the ride home was spent in silence, the only noise was the humming of the engine.

-

after a while without the angel that completed your relationship, you and crowley were able to move on.

to leave old memories behind, you managed to find a new apartment. you filled it with plants that thrived- whether it be through their fear of crowley or your green thumb. you even opened a plant nursery for something to do.

some nights, the pain would return.

you would wake from a dream of your angel, sharing a dinner or all of you cuddling on the couch with a cup of tea.

tears would be falling from your eyes when they opened, and at the smallest sound of a sniffle, crowley was awake. 

he was there to pull you into his arms and offer to make you a cup of tea in a whisper.

"i just need you," you'd tell him.

that was all he needed to hold you tight and wrap the blanket snugly around the two of you, his thumb carefully rubbing shapes into your skin to lull you to sleep.

on the rarer occasion, you would wake up to find him missing from the bed, a sliver of light filtering in through the bottom of your door.

you would carefully get out of bed, wrapping a blanket around your shoulders and leaving the room to find him sitting on the couch, staring off into nothing in silence.

you would make a cup of tea before sitting down with him, sharing the blanket and giving him a soft kiss on the cheek.

"are you okay?"

"i will be."

you'd nod, wrapping your arms around his waist and dozing off until you wake up in the morning, back in bed with crowley cuddled close. 

eventually, you'll be okay.

the remaining pain will fade away and your life will continue without aziraphale. 

taglists

good omens: none yet

crowley: none yet

aziraphale: none yet

[akari-ku]

…. It spells out ‘No Nightingales’ …

NO FUCKING NIGHTINGALES

N O N I G H T I N G A L E S

THE FIRST LETTER OF EACH SONG SPELLS NO NIGHTINGALES

and no, I’m not gonna go through every song and give you proof because it takes way to much time an-

STARMAN || ‘Now, now’

HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON EARTH || ‘Ooh, baby, do you what that’s worth?’

NON, JE NE REGRETTE RIEN || ‘Non rien de rien’

SO MUCH (FOR) STARDUST || ‘I’m in a winter mood, dreaming of spring now’

GIVE ME ONE REASON || ‘Give me one reason to stay here’

A THOUSAND YEARS || ‘Heart beats fast’

A NIGHTINGALE SANG IN BERKELEY SQUARE || ‘That certain night’

SWEET NOTHING || ‘I spy with my little tired eye’

IT'S BEEN A LONG, LONG TIME || ‘Never thought that you would be’

FAMOUS LAST WORDS || ‘Now I know that I can’t make you stay’

ALL THINGS END || ‘A two-tonne weight around my chest feels like’

LOVE OF MY LIFE || ‘Love of my life, you’ve hurt me’

ANGEL, PLEASE || ‘Even though’

A SINNER KISSED AN ANGEL || ‘Stars in the sky were dancing’

(Okay yes I know MCR doesn’t match up but let me have this)

N

O

N

I

G

H

I

G

A

L

E

S



[bluewinnerangel]

FITF Tour exit songs

- NA LEG - Uncasville: Tina Turner - The Best

Gilford: The Smiths - This Charming Man

Laval: Petula Clark - Downtown

Toronto: Bryan Adams - Summer Of '69

Cuyahoga Falls: The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

Sterling Heights: Shed Seven - Chasing Rainbows

Cincinnati: The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

Columbus: R.E.M. - The One I Love

Indianapolis: Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart

Maryland Heights (St. Louis): Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode

Kansas City: Van Morrison - Moondance

Milwaukee: Johnny Nash - I Can See Clearly Now

Chicago: Earth, Wind & Fire - September

Minneapolis: Sinéad O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U

Council Bluffs: Buzzcocks - Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)

Sioux Falls: Don McLean - American Pie

Seattle: The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

Vancouver: The Police - King Of Pain

Troutdale: Elvis Presley - Always On My Mind

Berkeley: INXS - Never Tear Us Apart

Los Angeles: 2Pac - California Love

Las Vegas: The Killers - Human

Phoenix: Spear Of Destiny - Liberator

Irving: The Doors - Hello, I Love You

Austin: Wheatus - Teenage Dirtbag

Houston The Woodlands: The Police - Walking On The Moon

St. Augustine: The Police - Every Breath You Take

Hollywood: Elton John - Your Song

Tampa: Pat Benatar - Hit Me With Your Best Shot

Atlanta: The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want

Nashville: Duran Duran - Hold Back The Rain

Charlotte: Lou Reed - Perfect Day

Raleigh: Van Morrison - Moondance

Columbia: Commodores - Easy

Boston 1: Boston - More Than A Feeling

Boston 2: Pixies - Here Comes Your Man

Philadelphia: Sinéad O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U

Asbury Park: Bruce Springsteen - Dancing In The Dark

New York: Queen - We Are The Champions (dj elf asked a fan to pick between this one and David Bowie - Heroes)

- EU & UK LEG - Hamburg: Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart

Copenhagen: Queen & David Bowie - Under Pressure

Oslo: Green Day - Wake Me Up When September Ends

Stockholm: The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Helsinki: Elvis Presley - Always On My Mind

Tallinn: Smash Mouth - All Star

Riga: AC/DC - Thunderstruck

Kaunas: Elvis Presley - Can't Help Falling in Love

Krakow: Iggy Pop - Lust For Life

Łódź: Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop

Vienna: Oasis - Supersonic

Ljubljana: The Killers - Smile Like You Mean It

Budapest: Bloc Party - Helicopter

Bucharest: Foo Fighters - My Hero

Sofia: Rage Against The Machine - Bombtrack

Bilbao: Pixies - Where Is My Mind

Lisbon: White Lies - Farewell to the Fairground

Madrid: Editors - Munich

Barcelona: At the Drive-In - One Armed Scissor

Turin: Lenny Kravitz - Are You Gonna Go My Way

Bologna: Bloc Party - Helicopter

Luxembourg: Pixies - Where Is My Mind

Antwerp: Queens Of The Stone Age - My God Is The Sun

Paris: Biffy Clyro - Bubbles

Amsterdam: Blur - Song 2

Cologne: The Libertines - Can't Stand Me Now

Prague: Jet - Are You Gonna Be My Girl

Berlin: The Cure - Friday I'm in Love

Munich: Fatboy Slim - Praise You

Zurich: The Strokes - Last Nite

Dublin: Inhaler - These Are The Days

Sheffield: The Killers - Mr. Brightside

Manchester: The Smiths - This Charming Man

Glasgow: The Snuts - Gloria

Brighton: Ramones - I Wanna Be Sedated

Cardiff: T. Rex - 20th Century Boy

London: The Libertines - Can't Stand Me Now

Birmingham: Boyz II Men - End Of The Road

- ASIA & AUS LEG - Jakarta: Iggy Pop - Lust For Life

Melbourne: Jet - Are You Gonna Be My Girl

Brisbane: The Temper Trap - Fader

Sydney: Oasis - Rock 'N' Roll Star

- LATAM LEG - Panama: Hard-Fi - Living for the Weekend

San Juan: Pixies - Where Is My Mind

Rio de Janeiro: Nirvana - Heart-Shaped Box

Like last time the plan is to keep editing this post as tour goes on - 2022 LTWT here

Apple music playlist here

[cuddlemen0w]

the gentleman and the flower — prologue | benedict bridgerton x reader (oc)

Summary: She never thought she would have such an opportunity. Lady Jenkins, her aunt, wanted to give the girl a proper welcome to society, that is what she said. A month in London, a month away from her chores and her home. Although she loved it there, she did want to know how it’s like wearing a fancy dress, drinking expensive sweet tasting lemonade and dancing with a gentleman. That thought alone was all it took for her to decide. She will go to London with lady Jenkins and her husband.

WC: 1.8k

A/N: You know what I'M BACK! This came to me a few days ago and I’ve been daydreaming about it ever since. Now, I do study English as my major at uni but it’s still not my first language, so I’m sorry for any mistakes I might make. I hope you like this one, as it’s a little different from the actual Bridgerton plot. It is a little bit of a twist to the Cinderella trope that Benedict’s story has. I was inspired by the Sense and Sensibility limited series and other works by Jane Austen as I deeply love her writing. Also yes, the name Jenkins is from Howl’s Moving Castle! :)

masterlist

Prologue

Benedict Bridgerton is not looking for a wife. It was quite clearly established that his brother, the viscount Anthony Bridgerton, was looking for his viscountess. So why on earth are there at least five mamas and even more young debutantes looking at him with such hungry eyes? Benedict knew he was an eligible bachelor, but he had hoped that this season he could be spared from women, the ones he did not seek, waiting for the slightest of glances from him just to march up to him and bat their sickeningly sweet eyes at him. He would dread these balls just for this reason alone, had they not been so horribly boring.

He sighed into his drink as his brother approached him by the refreshments. “They keep looking at me like I’m meat at the butcher’s,” Anthony whispered as he took his brother’s glass and gulped it in one go. “Hey! I was drinking that,” Benedict protested, “But I think Eloise is having it worse. Mama won’t let go of her arm.” The brothers glanced at their mother and sister and chuckled when they saw how Eloise turned down yet another gentleman. “Mama is going to force her onto one of us soon if she keeps this up,” Benedict snickered.

“What a wonderful idea, I might just go and take Eloise right from mama’s hands,” Anthony’s eyes brightened as he thrust Benedict’s empty glass back to him and left him to do whatever he was doing before he came over to complain.

“As if that is going to help him,” Benedict mumbled to himself as he inspected the glass. Not a single last drop. He should have sneaked in a bigger flask. And so he sighed again and picked a lemonade.

𝜗𝜚 ࣪˖

Her family wasn’t poor by any means. She had her own room, they had a horse and two cows, a few sheep, chickens, ducks and most importantly they had each other. Y/N only ever saw it that way. As a small child, she often heard her parents talk about how much they loved their life this way, and she never questioned what they meant. But as she got older she understood.

Her father was the third son of lord Jenkins. The lord was a good standing gentleman, who prided himself in having the perfect family, with two of his eldest sons marrying ladies from two of the wealthiest families at the time. He was fortunate enough to attend the King’s hunt before the Palace’s doors shut and he hoped that one day one of his descendants would attend the next King’s hunt as well. But it had seemed that all his pride and all his dreams were thrown away by his third son, Robert Jenkins, when he fell in love.

Adelaine Brown was a maid at Berkeley street in Mayfair, at the house Robert’s eldest brother, James, resided with his wife.

Adelaine and Robert first met when she was nineteen and cleaning dust at the library. Robert was twenty six then and had enough of his brother pestering him about marriage and duty. So he took the opportunity when an important letter came in and fled to the other room. They became fast friends when Robert helped her with her dusting and soon they became lovers. And when Adelaine came to him that she was with child he secretly married her in her coastal hometown in Scotland when he was twenty seven and she was twenty.

Robert hoped his father and brothers would understand, but instead the lord cast him out and his eldest brother laughed while it was happening. “Horrible maid, never did her job right. You two suit well though,” James sneered and threw Robert’s last things out of the door.

𝜗𝜚 ࣪˖

Their little blessing came at night. She screamed and cried until the morning but as the sun grazed the horizon and licked the waves the baby fell asleep. It was then that they named her. Adie softly whispered her name over and over and Rob felt at peace.

Y/N loved the animals even as a little babe. She would giggle at them when her father held her as her mother milked the cow. Robert would look at his two flowers and smile with his eyes. “You will get wrinkles like that,” Adelaine chuckled as she came over to them.

“I want all of my wrinkles because of you,” Robert mused and brought her closer. “In fact, I hope you get wrinkles because of me too.”

Adelaine laughed loudly, her head thrown back and her nose scrunching. “There it is. You laugh the same.” Robert pointed to the baby in his arms, giggling as always.

And that was how it was for some time.

𝜗𝜚 ࣪˖

“Love, the porridge isn’t going to eat itself,” scolded Adelaine. She had a few, almost unnoticeable wrinkles around her nose. Robert only hummed in response.

“Pa,” Y/N tried as she passed her mother another dish to wipe clean, “your breakfast is getting cold.” That seemed to get him to listen. The crows feet next to his eyes looked deeper, bigger, when he was concerned. 

“What’s going on in that head of yours, Robbie,” Adelaine asked gently. She finished wiping the dish clean and put her hands to her hips. “Is it about that letter that came in? Is it bad?” A pause. “Rob.”

“The old man’s dead.” Silence.

“Who is, pa.”

“Old Jenkins, the son of a bi–” Adelaine cut him off, “Rob! Don’t talk like that in front of your breakfast.” She glanced at their daughter who had a sheepish smile on her face. “And your daughter, for that matter.” Y/N sent her mother a thankful look. She wanted to hide behind the lock of hair that fell out of her pea green scarf.

“He left us nothing. I mean, I knew he would,” Robert said. “And so what, he was a horrible man and even a worse father,” Adelaine cut him off again.

“Adie, let me finish.” The women shared a look, but listened. Robert reached his rough hand into his vest pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. “He also gave James, my eldest brother, nothing.” He unfolded the paper and let it lay on the wooden table. There it was, black on white, before them.

Fate is a funny thing. It finds its way into everyone’s life, whether they want it or not. It is nature's way of justice and it is a higher power that no one can alter. And fate had taken her justice on the late lord Jenkins when he found his eldest son fornicating with his maid in his own house. He saw his son for who he was two weeks before his passing, and in that time he managed to rewrite his last will. He took him off completely, as he had done to his youngest son, for the lord was a man of his word.

“Now, David is the new lord Jenkins and he wants us to go back.”

Adelaine raised her brow at her husband. “You are not considering this, are you?” He said nothing. “Robert, we are not going back.”

“We are not going back,” the man of the house agreed wholeheartedly. “But I believe he is genuine.”

Y/N mother’s nose flared, steam almost coming out. “Y/N, love, please go outside and feed the chicks.”

“But I’ve already–” “No but, go!” Y/N had never heard or seen her mother so angry, so to not be the target of her mother’s fury, she scurried away to the hallway and closed the door after herself. Her hand reached for the basked for the seeds, although it was empty, as she did feed the chickens earlier that morning. Her hand stilled. The raised voices of her parents echoed from the kitchen.

She was not used to this. Her parents, gentle and loving, only ever argued in hushed tones, never did they go to bed angry at each other, and never did they raise their voice, at anyone. She didn’t hear much, they were arguing over each other. It was pointless to listen, so she grabbed the basket and hurried outside. But, before the girl could step out she heard her mother, loud and clear. “They called my daughter a bastard.”

Y/N’s breath hitched. Her usually bright and cheerful eyes stung with ushered tears. Not for her, but for her mother. She knew who her parents were, before their life in the countryside, before they moved to the coast. She knew her mother thought she brought this upon Robert. But he always promised his heart was here, with them, and he would not want it any other way. They were happy. But she knew they were also sad. Sad that they could never show their face in London, where all their friends were, where her father’s family was. Sad that something was stolen from them. Maybe a better, more comfortable life, or opportunities for their daughter. But they hid it well, their sadness was only reserved for cold nights, when all three would have to huddle to stay warm, even though their modest fireplace was blazing its flames.

“James and my father did, never David,” Robert calmly replied, his tears unseen by his daughter.

“I want to believe you,” Adelaine cried. “But they all think that I am a wh–” the interruption was quick and gentle. Robert took her in his arms, his lips at the crown of her head, whispering, “Don’t say that. It’s not true.” Repeating it over and over again. It was then that Y/N burst through the door, the basket forgotten on the floor in the hallway. Her father took them both into his arms and whispered sweetly. “My flowers. My petals.”

𝜗𝜚 ࣪˖

They didn’t talk about it. Not for a week. They went on with their lives as they were before that unfortunate morning. Y/N fed the animals, her mother milked the cow and her father tended to their garden and field.

They lived near a cliff, and they had the perfect view of the sea right from their windows. The waves looked like they were filling up the glass from certain angles and Y/N liked to watch it every morning, right after sunrise. She sat with her head resting on her forearms, her breakfast still hot next to her elbow.

She blinked from the sunlight and in that moment she saw a carriage, carried by two horses. As it neared, the realisation struck her, they were heading for their home. “Ma, there’s people outside.”

“Who would be here? At this time of day?” her mother replied nonchalantly, stirring the dough she was making.

Robert came running down the stairs, looking at his two girls, beaming. “I told you they were genuine!” he looked like a young child as he said it, almost too happy. “It’s David and his wife.”

[reasonsforhope]

"The man who has called climate change a “hoax” also can be expected to wreak havoc on federal agencies central to understanding, and combating, climate change. But plenty of climate action would be very difficult for a second Trump administration to unravel, and the 47th president won’t be able to stop the inevitable economy-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewables. 

“This is bad for the climate, full stop,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia Business School. “That said, this will be yet another wall that never gets built. Fundamental market forces are at play.”

A core irony of climate change is that markets incentivized the wide-scale burning of fossil fuels beginning in the Industrial Revolution, creating the mess humanity is mired in, and now those markets are driving a renewables revolution that will help fix it. Coal, oil, and gas are commodities whose prices fluctuate. As natural resources that humans pull from the ground, there’s really no improving on them — engineers can’t engineer new versions of coal. 

By contrast, solar panels, wind turbines, and appliances like induction stoves only get better — more efficient and cheaper — with time. Energy experts believe solar power, the price of which fell 90 percent between 2010 and 2020, will continue to proliferate across the landscape. (Last year, the United States added three times as much solar capacity as natural gas.) Heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces in the U.S., due in part to government incentives. Last year, Maine announced it had reached its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule, in part thanks to state rebates. So if the Trump administration cut off the funding for heat pumps that the IRA provides, states could pick up the slack. 

Local utilities are also finding novel ways to use heat pumps. Over in Massachusetts, for example, the utility Eversource Energy is experimenting with “networked geothermal,” in which the homes within a given neighborhood tap into water pumped from underground. Heat pumps use that water to heat or cool a space, which is vastly more efficient than burning natural gas. Eversource and two dozen other utilities, representing about half of the country’s natural gas customers, have formed a coalition to deploy more networked geothermal systems.

Beyond being more efficient, green tech is simply cheaper to adopt. Consider Texas, which long ago divorced its electrical grid from the national grid so it could skirt federal regulation. The Lone Star State is the nation’s biggest oil and gas producer, but it gets 40 percent of its total energy from carbon-free sources. “Texas has the most solar and wind of any state, not because Republicans in Texas love renewables, but because it’s the cheapest form of electricity there,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a climate research nonprofit. The next top three states for producing wind power — Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are red, too.

State regulators are also pressuring utilities to slash emissions, further driving the adoption of wind and solar power. As part of California’s goal of decarbonizing its power by 2045, the state increased battery storage by 757 percent between 2019 and 2023. Even electric cars and electric school buses can provide backup power for the grid. That allows utilities to load up on bountiful solar energy during the day, then drain those batteries at night — essential for weaning off fossil fuel power plants. Trump could slap tariffs on imported solar panels and thereby increase their price, but that would likely boost domestic manufacturing of those panels, helping the fledgling photovoltaic manufacturing industry in red states like Georgia and Texas.

The irony of Biden’s signature climate bill is states that overwhelmingly support Trump are some of the largest recipients of its funding. That means tampering with the IRA could land a Trump administration in political peril even with Republican control of the Senate, if not Congress. In addition to providing incentives to households (last year alone, 3.4 million American families claimed more than $8 billion in tax credits for home energy improvements), the legislation has so far resulted in $150 billion of new investment in the green economy since it was passed in 2022, boosting the manufacturing of technologies like batteries and solar panels. According to Atlas Public Policy, a research group, that could eventually create 160,000 jobs. “Something like 66 percent of all of the spending in the IRA has gone to red states,” Hausfather said. “There certainly is a contingency in the Republican party now that’s going to support keeping some of those subsidies around.”

Before Biden’s climate legislation passed, much more progress was happening at a state and local level. New York, for instance, set a goal to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 40 percent by 2030, and 85 percent by 2050. Colorado, too, is aiming to slash emissions by at least 90 percent by 2050. The automaker Stellantis has signed an agreement with the state of California promising to meet the state’s zero-emissions vehicle mandate even if a judicial or federal action overturns it. It then sells those same cars in other states. 

“State governments are going to be the clearest counterbalance to the direction that Donald Trump will take the country on environmental policy,” said Thad Kousser, co-director of the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at the University of California, San Diego. “California and the states that ally with it are going to try to adhere to tighter standards if the Trump administration lowers national standards.”

[Note: One of the obscure but great things about how emissions regulations/markets work in the US is that automakers generally all follow California's emissions standards, and those standards are substantially higher than federal standards. Source]

Last week, 62 percent of Washington state voters soundly rejected a ballot initiative seeking to repeal a landmark law that raised funds to fight climate change. “Donald Trump’s going to learn something that our opponents in our initiative battle learned: Once people have a benefit, you can’t take it away,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said in a press call Friday. “He is going to lose in his efforts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, because governors, mayors of both parties, are going to say, ‘This belongs to me, and you’re not going to get your grubby hands on it.’”

Even without federal funding, states regularly embark on their own large-scale projects to adapt to climate change. California voters, for instance, just overwhelmingly approved a $10 billion bond to fund water, climate, and wildfire prevention projects. “That will be an example,” said Saharnaz Mirzazad, executive director of the U.S. branch of ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability. “You can use that on a state level or local level to have [more of] these types of bonds. You can help build some infrastructure that is more resilient.”

Urban areas, too, have been major drivers of climate action: In 2021, 130 U.S. cities signed a U.N.-backed pledge to accelerate their decarbonization. “Having an unsupportive federal government, to say the least, will be not helpful,” said David Miller, managing director at the Centre for Urban Climate Policy and Economy at C40, a global network of mayors fighting climate change. “It doesn’t mean at all that climate action will stop. It won’t, and we’ve already seen that twice in recent U.S. history, when Republican administrations pulled out of international agreements. Cities step to the fore.”

And not in isolation, because mayors talk: Cities share information about how to write legislation, such as laws that reduce carbon emissions in buildings and ensure that new developments are connected to public transportation. They transform their food systems to grow more crops locally, providing jobs and reducing emissions associated with shipping produce from afar. “If anything,” Miller said, “having to push against an administration, like that we imagine is coming, will redouble the efforts to push at the local level.” 

Federal funding — like how the U.S. Forest Service has been handing out $1.5 billion for planting trees in urban areas, made possible by the IRA — might dry up for many local projects, but city governments, community groups, and philanthropies will still be there. “You picture a web, and we’re taking scissors or a machete or something, and chopping one part of that web out,” said Elizabeth Sawin, the director of the Multisolving Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes climate solutions. “There’s this resilience of having all these layers of partners.”

All told, climate progress has been unfolding on so many fronts for so many years — often without enough support from the federal government — that it will persist regardless of who occupies the White House. “This too shall pass, and hopefully we will be in a more favorable policy environment in four years,” Hausfather said. “In the meantime, we’ll have to keep trying to make clean energy cheap and hope that it wins on its merits.”"

-via Grist, November 11, 2024. A timely reminder.

[loumandaniel]

OKAY SO a lot of my s3 thoughts are informed by the rly weird (and imo satisfying!) things the show does w/its multiple timelines, non-chronological storytelling, forced limited pov, etc

SEASON 3 THEORIES:

s3 is going to combine the events of tvl and qotd! it’s gonna kickoff in media res with the Vampire Lestat San Francisco concert, and the events of s3-4 (x8ep each) with drive towards the end of qotd (i believe they will tie off loose ends so that the series feels complete, but leave opportunities for s4)

the meta container for the show is gonna be Daniel Molloy directing a rockumentary — Lestat is going to be a MUCH more willfully unreliable narrator than Louis on purpose so they’re gonna have a lot of fun with the visual representation of this — instead of “was it raining Louis?” it’s going to be “and then all the wolves did a Busby Berkeley dance number” and Daniel’s like “they did fucking not, but proceed”

it’s not just gonna be vox pops either, it’s going to be like 20,000 Days on Earth meets Desolation Center meets The Decline of Western Civilization

setting more stuff in SF is going to dig in a bit more to the history of SF’s response to the AIDS crisis & Shadows in the Skin is going to be a direct homage to And the Band Played On

Rashid goes on tour with Daniel & Lestat as Daniel’s Talamasca handler

loumand divorce sex

lbf shows up for a hallucinatory threesome involving young & old daniel

Louis, Claudia, and Armand are going to appear in Lestat’s recollections so there will be interesting stuff re: seeing them thru Lestat’s eyes

Past devils minion happened only in so far as stalking that Daniel never fully recognizes as such — he’s haunted but he’s worried it’s someone he borrowed money from, who he ripped off with bad dope, the boyfriend of someone he slept with looking for revenge etc

cough Julian Rhind-Tutt as Marius cough

okay okay i have to watch 20,000 days on earth because you and grace are both talking about it in relation to s3. you’ve given me so much TBR and watchlist material

i’m so stuck on the rockumentary, the use of the errol morris interrotron, and daniel’s mind gift now. i keep meaning to ask you about the three in relation. the camera method is typically intimate and up close (shifty lies caught in hd), but daniel should pretty adept at the mind gift by then. i feel as if lestat’s just better at blocking is a bit of a cop out personally. i’ve seen theories louis could take over midway.

louis in lestat’s eyes!!! it’s gonna be pink clouds and heart filters whenever the camera is on him. i’ve been really interested in claudia’s ghost as well. jesse reeves first sees her in the townhouse and i wonder if that’s why lestat no longer lived there.

there’s a line in queen of the damned “memory is a menace” and i think that’s the theme forward next to the odyssey of recollection” & “memory is a monster” of s1/2