Dr Keith Walker @SteelFolk@social.cleverlibre.org

♫ psycho killer, cat cassette ♫

When a car is repaired after a crash, the GDP goes up.

When a fruit or vegetable is grown only to be thrown out by a supermarket as food waste, the GDP goes up.

When you replace a phone that still works because of planned obsolescence, the GDP goes up.

When you throw out a perfectly good coat because it's no longer fashionable, and buy a new one in this season's style, the GDP goes up.

When a bridge has to be replaced because it wasn't built right, the GDP goes up.

When a piece of packaging is manufactured only to be thrown away straight away, the GDP goes up.

When a site needs to be decontaminated because chemicals weren't stored correctly, the GDP goes up.

In each case, society has no more usable wealth than it would have had if the car didn't crash, the vegetable wasn't grown, the phone wasn't replaced, the old coat was still being worn, there was less packaging, or the chemicals were stored correctly. Yet the GDP goes up.

Meanwhile, most of the wealth that is generated ends up in the top one percent's pockets.

The truth is that GDP isn't a useful measurement. It's just a convenient one.

#economics #politics #gdp #auspol #ukpol

Can we predict if atmospheric CO2 grows faster or slower than what is expected from emissions' growth?

Yes, by assimilating observational data into an #ESM, we gain a predictive skill of 5 years for the air–sea CO2 flux, and 2 years for the air–land CO2 flux and atmospheric carbon growth rate.

Find out more on how we predict the global carbon cycle and evaluate modeled atmospheric CO2 in our new study:

https://esd.copernicus.org/articles/14/101/2023/

led by @HongmeiLi at my group @MPI_Meteo

#ilyinaScience

I have just submitted evidence to the House of Lords asking them to stop the government's attempt to curb the right to strike. Can you join in too? #SupportAmendment1 @organisehq https://tinyurl.com/23yoledm

Please boost even if this isn't for you. On Mastodon, favoriting is not like 'liking' on the other site. All it does is it tell the writer you liked it, there is no algorithm.

Trying to reach #KidneyVerse people on Mastodon

#KidneyDocs and #KidneyResearchers

Consider submitting your #KidneyResearch to #CJKHD (Canadian Journal of Kidney Health & Disease)

We have a policy of supportive review. Here's the piece we wrote about the central role of kindness in peer-review

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/…

We aren't here on Mastodon yet but working on it. @CanJKHD at the other place.

#KidneyKindness #Kidney #KidneyVerse #AskRenal

I wonder at times how those billionaires who apparently don't give a f-ck about climate change, want to deal with its impacts?
Should someone tell them that the side effects are not only societal instability or that it's getting warmer? It is also about collapse of agriculture and natural systems, species extinction, increasing weather extremes - just to name a few.

Who is going to deliver lobsters to their bunker?

Getting emissions down will actually lead to a better life on Earth!

@Raven47

What if we can't stop climate change disaster without dismantling white supremacy and racism?

What if it is the root cause and explains why we continue hurtling towards a mass extinction event despite scientific consensus?

What if we are trying to fix climate change within the same system that created the problem in the first place?

A group of "Scared Scientists" created a website. Here is what one of them has to say...
________________________

MATTHEW ENGLAND
Oceanographer, Climate scientist,
University of NSW, Sydney

STATEMENT:

Accelerated warming and expansion of water in the oceans and increased melting rates of glaciers and ice caps are expected to increase sea levels by a metre or more over the next 100 years. This will pose a decisive threat to the existence of human settlements, infrastructures, and industries across the world that are close to shorelines. Those environmental degradations will aggravate global conflict as tens of millions of people migrate and their food supplies become threatened.

We need to understand that the cost of solving the problem is so much less than the cost of dealing with it down the track — that cost is going to be huge for future generations. Not dealing with it is selfish, short-sighted, narrow-minded, and obscene. It represents such a level of injustice as those that are going to be impacted are not playing a role in the decisions that are being made now.

MORE HERE -- https://cargocollective.com/scared_scientists

#ClimateCatastrophe #GlobalHeating #SeaLevelRise #ClimateJustice

Meanwhile, another national newspaper article about the wonders of metal detecting that makes no mention whatsoever of the PAS, FLOs, or the Treasure Act. #archaeology #treasurehunting https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/feb/05/metal-heads-the-thriving-detectorist-scene-digging-up-britains-past

A reporter once asked me if I knew SBF personally. Apparently sensing I was confused by why that might be likely, they pointed out that we would've been in college in Boston/Cambridge at the same time. Especially since then, it's been very weird to read stories about how maybe he's just a poor smol bean who made a whoopsie when most of us have managed to somehow not toddle our way into financial fraud at the fragile age of 30 YEARS OLD.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/sam-bankman-fried-is-not-a-child

True story.

The idea that bad people having a voice on social media causes other people to become bad people (often the argument as to why we must defederate from bad servers) is equivalent to:

Thinking violent video games cause people to become violent.

Thinking explicit song lyrics cause people to become criminals

Allowing people to be openly homosexual will cause others to become homosexual

Banning books

Catastrophic (and to be frank - hugely depressing)

This new research in @PNASNews suggests earth will cross the 1.5 degrees C temperature increase threshold in the next decade (within just 10 to 15 years) and is likely to exceed 2 degrees C by around 2060.

This should be THE lead story on the news today (and onwards) and the lead action point for our governments. It should trigger a massive call for real global action to combat the #climateemergency - sadly though I fear this news will barely register.

We have to stop believing the siren calls of future technology solutions and #carbonoffsets - the immediate need is a rapid end to the use of #fossilfuels and a massive rollout of #renewableenergy

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2207183120

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis