#15: With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility

Apologies for the delay: travel and babies and nominating the first woman for candidacy to the highest office in the land has me quite a bit behind this week.

Continuing last week's theme: it's 101 days until the US presidential election and while this isn't a political newsletter, and there's a number of important issues that should drive your vote, it's vital to recognize that the time is now, is yesterday, to make up ground in the climate change fight. The next eight years mean everything -- we commit to change, or we fail.

If you do me a small favor and walk outside you might notice is hot as Satan's balls out there, and it's not going to get better anytime soon. And science tells us that the climate has a 40 year lag time -- so all the damage we've done since, you know, fucking Vietnam, hasn't even hit yet. Nor can we just wipe it away.

But we can dig in, and elect folks to office, all the way down the chain, that believe and will actively fight for our planet's future. Because we haven't built that Martian colony yet, so this is the only planet we've got. Make the right choice, for our future and our children's.

On to the news!


1. Climate change gif's are fun and also show the end of times - ClimateChangeNews

+ MY NOTES: Remember that awesome climate gif we shared? Yeah, that inspired a bunch of scientists, who I guess previously didn't understand how the internet works and how millennials digest information, to create their own. Compelling, terrifying, pretty!


2. A recommendation: Word is most climate scientists deal with constant depression. There's a reason why, and it's called "we're all gonna die". This is a long read, and a brutally honest assessment of where we stand and how we've fallen behind. I highly recommend you read it, but also realize: it's heavy.

"We see the climate change taking the planet apart right in front of our eyes. We also clearly see, right in front of us, what urgently needs to done to stave off global disaster on an unprecedented scale. We need carbon taxes and the reconversion of industry and energy towards zero CO2 emissions systems. This route is without any doubt technically and economically feasible, but politically it seems to be permanently locked. If we do not unlock it, the future looks bleak, not to say hopeless, for humankind."

+ MY NOTES: Once again -- I'm not trying to bring you down -- but I am trying to do everything I can to help convey the severity of the situation.


3. Is climate too complex to model? - Popular Science

" Climate models have to account for interactions between the land surface, ice, oceans, the sun, and the atmosphere, among other factors. What’s remarkable is that despite their complexity, climate models do an impressively good job, as we’ll explain, and are improving all the time...The models don’t get some things right, but where they get it wrong, it is almost always in the direction of underestimating the scale and pace of the problem."

+ MY NOTES: Chaos theory for the win!


4. Why THIS climate scientist still has hope - Popular Science

"Global warming is no longer an anticipation. It is no longer something for children or grandchildren to worry about. This is it. We have created the global warming era, now. And yet, almost unnoticed, the tools to solve the issue have begun to appear. The deniers and delayers have lost simply because they could not hide the economic logic of addressing the problem, or convince entrepreneurs not to invent."

+ MY NOTES: The audacity of hope.


5. All of the nation's top scientists send letter to Congress, saying "show me with your actions, not your words, you hypocritical fuckers". - NPR

"If climate science is hoax and the Crop Science Society of America signed the letter, then doesn't that make crop science suspect, too? And, of course, you can't have modern, advanced agriculture without understanding soil. That's the domain of the Soil Science Society of America. They've signed on to the AAAS letter, too. But that must mean we shouldn't trust any of their claims about how to grow food."

+ MY NOTES: You don't trust climate science but you trust your iPhone is going to work. You don't trust climate science but you watch the NFL on a satellite feed. It's bullshit.