#china emerges

[reasonsforhope]

Masterpost: Reasons I firmly believe we will beat climate change

Posts are in reverse chronological order (by post date, not article date), mostly taken from my "climate change" tag, which I went through all the way back to the literal beginning of my blog. Will update periodically.

Especially big deal articles/posts are in bold.

Big picture:

Mature trees offer hope in world of rising emissions (x)

Spying from space: How satellites can help identify and rein in a potent climate pollutant (x)

Good news: Tiny urban green spaces can cool cities and save lives (x)

Conservation and economic development go hand in hand, more often than expected (x)

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world (x)

Sun Machines: Solar, an energy that gets cheaper and cheaper, is going to be huge (x)

Wealthy nations finally deliver promised climate aid, as calls for more equitable funding for poor countries grow (x)

For Earth Day 2024, experts are spreading optimism – not doom. Here's why. (x)

Opinion: I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore. (x)

The World’s Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think (x)

‘Staggering’ green growth gives hope for 1.5C, says global energy chief (x)

Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (x)

Young Forests Capture Carbon Quicker than Previously Thought (x)

Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here's how. (x)

Soil improvements could keep planet within 1.5C heating target, research shows (x)

The global treaty to save the ozone layer has also slowed Arctic ice melt (x)

The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past (x)

Scientists Find Methane is Actually Offsetting 30% of its Own Heating Effect on Planet (x)

Are debt-for-climate swaps finally taking off? (x)

High seas treaty: historic deal to protect international waters finally reached at UN (x)

How Could Positive ‘Tipping Points’ Accelerate Climate Action? (x)

Specific examples:

Environmental Campaigners Celebrate As Labour Ends Tory Ban On New Onshore Wind Projects (x)

Private firms are driving a revolution in solar power in Africa (x)

How the small Pacific island nation of Vanuatu drastically cut plastic pollution (x)

Rewilding sites have seen 400% increase in jobs since 2008, research finds [Scotland] (x)

The American Climate Corps take flight, with most jobs based in the West (x)

Waste Heat Generated from Electronics to Warm Finnish City in Winter Thanks to Groundbreaking Thermal Energy Project (x)

Climate protection is now a human right — and lawsuits will follow [European Union] (x)

A new EU ecocide law ‘marks the end of impunity for environmental criminals’ (x)

Solar hits a renewable energy milestone not seen since WWII [United States] (x)

These are the climate grannies. They’ll do whatever it takes to protect their grandchildren. [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

Century of Tree Planting Stalls the Warming Effects in the Eastern United States, Says Study (x)

Chart: Wind and solar are closing in on fossil fuels in the EU (x)

UK use of gas and coal for electricity at lowest since 1957, figures show (x)

Countries That Generate 100% Renewable Energy Electricity (x)

Indigenous advocacy leads to largest dam removal project in US history [United States and Native American Nations] (x)

India’s clean energy transition is rapidly underway, benefiting the entire world (x)

China is set to shatter its wind and solar target five years early, new report finds (x)

‘Game changing’: spate of US lawsuits calls big oil to account for climate crisis (x)

Largest-ever data set collection shows how coral reefs can survive climate change (x)

The Biggest Climate Bill of Your Life - But What Does It DO? [United States] (x)

Good Climate News: Headline Roundup April 1st through April 15th, 2023 (x)

How agroforestry can restore degraded lands and provide income in the Amazon (x) [Brazil]

Loss of Climate-Crucial Mangrove Forests Has Slowed to Near-Negligable Amount Worldwide, Report Hails (x)

Agroecology schools help communities restore degraded land in Guatemala (x)

Climate adaptation:

Solar-powered generators pull clean drinking water 'from thin air,' aiding communities in need: 'It transforms lives' (x)

‘Sponge’ Cities Combat Urban Flooding by Letting Nature Do the Work [China] (x)

Indian Engineers Tackle Water Shortages with Star Wars Tech in Kerala (x)

A green roof or rooftop solar? You can combine them in a biosolar roof — boosting both biodiversity and power output (x)

Global death tolls from natural disasters have actually plummeted over the last century (x)

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be (x)

This city turns sewage into drinking water in 24 hours. The concept is catching on [Namibia] (x)

Plants teach their offspring how to adapt to climate change, scientists find (x)

Resurrecting Climate-Resilient Rice in India (x)

Other Masterposts:

Going carbon negative and how we're going to fix global heating (x)

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

this is a true story happend in fengcheng city丰城市, jiangxi province of china in 2022

[oldtvlover]

Hi gang,

so another week and a half with Randy over. With Monday I'm going to start E! again. lol

-> L.A. Law - as a car dealer in trouble

-> China Beach - as a barkeeper but more therapist

-> Baywatch - as a Secret Service agent

-> JAG - as a General (with the right hair cut) lol

-> Walker (original) - as a really bad guy who even kills a horse *shudders*

-> Promised Land - as a grieving father who almost does something he may have regretted

and one season later

-> Diagnosis: Murder - once as a firefighter and mayor and as a narrator for TV

-> Criminal Minds - as a father still helping his son

-> Ghost Whisperer - as a father dealing with an old loss

-> Sons of Anarchy - as a Native American mob boss

And as the grand final tonight:

-> Battlestar Galactica - as Michael

So, that's it again. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about my promises but with my mass of pics it takes some time. *grins*

All pictures are from the Internet.

Enjoy!

[fatehbaz]

Nothing in the past, moreover, gave any cause to suspect ginseng’s presence so far away. Or even closer by: since antiquity, for well over a millennium, the ginseng consumed in all of East Asia had come from just one area -- the northeast mountainous lands straddling Manchuria and Korea. No one had found it anywhere else. No one was even thinking, now, to look elsewhere. The [...] [French traveler] Joseph-Francois Lafitau didn’t know this. He had been [...] visiting Quebec on mission business in October of 1715 [...]. He began to search for ginseng. [...] [T]hen one day he spotted it [...]. Ginseng did indeed grow in North America. [...]

Prior to the nuclear disaster in the spring of 2011, few outside Japan could have placed Fukushima on a map of the world. In the geography of ginseng, however, it had long been a significant site. The Edo period domain of Aizu, which was located here, had been the first to try to grow the plant on Japanese soil, and over the course of the following centuries, Fukushima, together with Nagano prefecture, has accounted for the overwhelming majority of ginseng production in the country.

Aizu’s pioneering trials in cultivation began in 1716 – by coincidence, exactly the same year that Lafitau found the plant growing wild in the forests of Canada. [...]

---

Since the 1670s the numbers of people [in Japan] clamoring for access to the drug had swelled enormously, and this demand had to be met entirely through imports. The attempt to cultivate ginseng in Aizu -- and soon after, many other domains -- was a response to a fiscal crisis.

Massive sums of silver were flowing out of the country to pay for ginseng and other drugs [...]. Arai Hakuseki, the chief policy maker [...], calculated that no less than 75% of the country’s gold, and 25% of its silver had drained out of Japan [to pay for imports] [...]. Expenditures for ginseng were particularly egregious [...]: in the half-century between 1670s through the mid-1720s that marked the height of ginseng fever in Japan, officially recorded yearly imports of Korean ginseng through Tsushima sometimes reached as much as four to five thousand kin (approx. 2.4–3 metric tons).

What was to be done? [...] The drain of bullion was unrelenting. [...] [T]he shogunate repeatedly debased its currency, minting coins that bore the same denomination, but contained progressively less silver. Whereas the large silver coin first issued in 1601 had been 80% pure, the version issued in 1695 was only 64% silver, and the 1703 mint just 50%. Naturally enough, ginseng dealers in Korea were indifferent to the quandaries of the Japanese rulers, and insisted on payment as before; they refused the debased coins. The Japanese response speaks volumes about the unique claims of the drug among national priorities: in 1710 (and again in 1736) a special silver coin of the original 80% purity was minted exclusively for use in the ginseng trade. [...]

[T]he project of cultivating ginseng and other medicines in Japan became central to the economic and social strategy of the eighth shogun Yoshimune after he assumed power in 1716. [...]

---

China and Korea were naturally eager to retain their monopolies of this precious commodity, and strictly banned all export of live plants and seeds. They jealously guarded as well against theft of mature roots: contemporary Chinese histories, for example, record that the prisons of Shenjing (present day Shenyang) overflowed with ginseng poaching suspects. So many were caught, indeed, that the legal bureaucracy couldn’t keep up. 

In 1724, the alarming numbers of suspected poachers who died in prison while awaiting trial led to the abandonment of the regular system of trials by judges dispatched from Beijing, and a shift to more expeditious reviews handled by local officials. [...]

Even in 1721. the secret orders that the shogunate sent the domain of Tsushima called for procuring merely three live plants [...]. Two other forays into Korea 1727 succeeded in presenting the shogun with another four and seven plants respectively. Meanwhile, in 1725 a Manchu merchant in Nagasaki named Yu Meiji [...] managed to smuggle in and present three live plants and a hundred seeds. [...]

Despite its modest volume, this botanical piracy eventually did the trick. By 1738, transplanted plants yielded enough seeds that the shogunate could share them with enterprising domains. [...] Ginseng eventually became so plentiful that in 1790 the government announced the complete liberalization of cultivation and sales: anyone was now free to grow or sell it.

---

By the late eighteenth century, then, the geography of ginseng looked dramatically different from a century earlier.

This precious root, which had long been restricted to a small corner of the northeast Asian continent, had not only been found growing naturally and in abundance in distant North America, but had also been successfully transplanted and was now flourishing in the neighboring island of Japan. […]

---

Colonial Americans, for their part, had developed their own new addiction: an unquenchable thirst for tea. […] This implacable need could have posed a serious problem. [...] [I]ts regular consumption was a costly habit.

Which is why the local discovery of ginseng was a true godsend.

When the Empress of China sailed to Canton in 1784 as the first ship to trade under the flag of the newly independent United States, it was this coveted root that furnished the overwhelming bulk of sales. Though other goods formed part of early Sino-American commerce – Chinese porcelain and silk, for example, and American pelts – the essential core of trade was the exchange of American ginseng for Chinese tea. [...]

---

Yoshimune’s transplantation project had succeeded to the point that Japan actually became a ginseng exporter. As early as 1765, Zhao Xuemin’s Supplement to the compedium of material medica would note the recent popularity of Japanese ginseng in China. Unlike the “French” ginseng from Canada, which cooled the body, Zhao explained, the “Asian” ginseng (dongyang shen) from Japan, like the native [Korean/Chinese] variety, tended to warm. Local habitats still mattered in the reconfigured geography of ginseng. [...]

What is place? What is time? The history of ginseng in the long eighteenth century is the story of an ever-shifting alchemical web. [...] Thanks to the English craving for tea, ginseng, which two centuries earlier had threatened to bankrupt Japan, now figured to become a major source of national wealth [for Japan] .

---

Text by: Shigehisa Kuriyama. “The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[sorrysomethingwentwrong]

Yang Yongliang, “The Falls” (2023),

4K video, 8 feet, dimensions variable

[zimshan]

say it with me now

it’s not “pro-life”

it’s “forced birth”

and any government who can force someone to give birth?

can also force someone to be sterilized.

(do you hear that, “save the babies” crowd? you hear that men?)

do you want a government deciding whether you are worthy enough to procreate?

no? then you don’t want to give a government the power to force people to give birth.

it’s the same right. it’s bodily autonomy. your right to decide what happens to your body.

if you want to have a child

if you don’t want to have a child

the overturning of roe affects you

it means ob/gyn practices caring more about breaking laws than practicing medicine

it means distrust and suspicion among ob/gyn healthcare teams (at a time of already high burnout thanks to the pandemic)

that means less safe healthcare

that means higher maternal mortality rates

thats real women dying

what on earth is “pro-life” about that?

call “prolifers” what they are: pro–forced birth.

they are for governments forcing people to give birth.

government-mandated birth.

even if it kills you.

the real death panels.

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

[insightfultake]

India and China: The Economic Tug of War

China and India are two titans poised on the great field of the world economy. Being the two most populated countries in the world, they both have a different story of development, invention, and promise. Many of us are wondering with an eye toward the future: how long until India catches up to its neighbour if it continues on its current trajectory of economy?

China's GDP, estimated to be valued at $17 trillion as of 2023, is far larger than India's remarkable $3.5 trillion. China, with its enormous labor force and infrastructure, has been the unchallenged leader in manufacturing, establishing itself as the "world's factory." Contrarily, India has made a name for itself in the services industry by demonstrating its expertise in software and IT services at the forefront of the development and growth. Nevertheless, things are improving. India has been increasing its GDP faster than China, often by a significant margin. While China is experiencing a slowdown in its economy due to an aging population and an imminent debt crisis, India is benefiting from a demographic dividend. Its youthful population has a unique opportunity for economic growth, accounting for over 65% of the total....expand more to read.

[tornadoquest]

Tornado Quest Top Science Links For October 28 - November 4, 2023 #science #weather #climate #hurricane #health

Greetings everyone. Thanks for stopping by. With a few weeks left in the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane season I will continue with hurricane preparedness information that you’ll find helpful. There are other interesting reads this week, so let’s get started. There’s a joke in here somewhere. “China’s spy-hunting campaign has a new target: ‘Illegal’ weather stations.” In our warming planet,…

[myscprin]

Young Qiu: 120 I think my friend is dead

Emergency Operator: okay, first thing first, check and make sure he's dead before--

Young Qiu: *bang* okay now what?!

Emergency Operator: ....

[f1ghtsoftly]

there is going to be another world war maybe not this year but in the next decade.

[dykeogenes]

The post was against the convoy— calling out the hypocrisy of Canada’s response to a socialist state dealing with the same kinds of protesters. Can you learn to read?

first of all, i really can't emphasize enough how much true north was not condemning the convoy.

source aside, the chinese anti-lockdown protests are not the same thing as the fucking convoy was. are they more similar than a lot of rabidly anti-chinese western media would like to believe? yeah, sure, i'll give you that. but they're still not even close to the same. the policies in force in canada a year ago (hint: there were essentially none-- the fact that a gang of rabid antivaxxers were able to drive to ottawa and camp downtown for two weeks should probably tell you a lot) and the policies in force in china now are night-and-day different, as are the surrounding social and medical contexts.

to be extremely clear-- nobody was denying the convoy their right to protest. trudeau was denying their right to blockade parliament hill for two weeks, hurl racial slurs at paramedics and soup kitchen staff, piss and shit on public property by choice, pull their kids out of school and leave them huffing fumes all day, harass and intimidate ottawa residents, and desecrate memorials. they could have marched and picketed and waved signs as long as they wanted. they just couldn't fucking do it in ambulance bays, and they couldn't do it with nazi flags. contrast this with the chinese policies being protested against now. in order for two sets of responses to demonstrate hypocrisy, they have to be responses to the same thing. apples, oranges, etc.

[sharemarketinsider]

India and China: A New Era of Diplomacy Amid Lingering Tensions

Can India and China truly overcome past tensions for a stable future? 🕊️ As diplomatic talks resume post-Galwan, new opportunities and risks emerge. Explore the evolving dynamics of Asia's powerhouses. Read more for in-depth insights! 👉

[trendynewsnow]

Putin Hosts Global Leaders Amid Western Isolation

Putin Welcomes Global Leaders Amid International Isolation In a notable display of diplomatic resilience, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia hosted the leaders of China, India, and South Africa at the opening of a summit for emerging market countries, which seeks to rebalance a world order increasingly influenced by the United States. This gathering comes at a time when Mr. Putin faces…

[creativemedianews]

The Rise of Tech Giants: How Countries Compete for Innovation Supremacy

The Rise of Tech Giants: How Countries Compete for Innovation Supremacy #Chinainnovation #emergingtechnologies

[familythings]

Understanding Hurricanes: Facts and Safety Tips

As we are all holding our breath about Hurricane Milton and praying for all people and animals still in the risky area in Florida, I took some time to make some searches about hurricanes. I learned many things I had never heard before about this force majeure, which places many people in life-threatening risk, including a close friend of mine living in the Tampa area. She managed to move from her…