- The internet is now mainly driven by shopping
- Arundhati Roy says lots of insightful things about colonialism, capitalism and sustainability.
- I’m seeing a rise in “farewell to the Earth we knew” articles, videos, etc. These scientists are saying goodbye to cold weather as the arctic warms. In this video, a Solomon Islander bids farewell to their island lives. What will you miss as climate chaos changes your life?
- Visualizing the Mississippi’s evolving route
- Great podcast (in Dutch) with a Dutch woman working for Greenpeace on climate change, etc.
- The EU’s CAP is exploited by corrupt politicians (and not very helpful for small farmers)
- Vitalik Buterin (inventor of Ethereum) writes a nice overview of quadratic payments, which can be used as a hybrid voting mechanism. I should have used this method in my 2009 paper [pdf] on fighting over water in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
- Schools need to stop teaching to the test and focus on learning.
- Funny how we only started to understand the oceans about 50 years ago!
- Want to see the future? Spend some time on these maps showing how climate
changechaos impacts will vary across the US. Related: RCP 8.5 (the “worst case scenario” for global heating, with an average increase of 4.9C by 2100) is sometimes called “business as usual,” but its proposed pathways of population growth (12 billion people), GDP growth (very slow) and coal use (a multiple of today’s use in contrast to current downward trends) tend to attract criticism. I agree that those assumptions are questionable, but this article makes the obvious point that we might get to RCP8.5 by a combination of human activity (10 billion richer people using lots of oil and gas on goodies as well as coping with chaos) and natural feedback loops (lost albedo as Arctic summer ice disappears, permafrost belching methane, perennial fires/loss of tree cover), such that we get that scenario anyway. Not a good scenario.
H/T to JP