Dr Keith Walker @SteelFolk@social.cleverlibre.org

This is deeply wrong, but it's an interesting *kind* of wrong.

Our perception of the past telescopes: there's the recent past, what we remember; the middle past, what our parents and grandparents remember; the long past, out of living memory but still preserved in familiar stories; and everything else. As I've said before, a lot of Americans' idea of *human* #history seems to go roughly as follows:

1. #Cavemen.
2. #Pyramids.
3. #Jesus.
4. Robin Hood and King Arthur.
5. #Columbus and #pirates.
6. #Pilgrims and George Washington.
7. #Cowboys.
8. World War Two. (One must have happened somewhere?)
9. #Hippies and #Vietnam.
10. The real world begins with the momentous event of my birth.

Nor is this uniquely an American problem—some places have better educational systems than others, but I think people everywhere hold similar mythologized versions of world events leading uniquely and inevitably to their own central place in the world.

So here's an extreme version of the same phenomenon applied to natural history. Most reasonably educated people have some idea that not all prehistoric animals lived at the same time (although poor #Dimetrodon is forever going to be mixed in with #dinosaurs) but they do tend to lump enormous spans of time together: #mammoths and #sabertooths, before that all dinosaurs all at once, and before that ... I dunno ... jellyfish or something.

#Creationists, of course, turn it up to 11.

The two lead authors on this review of #LongCovid for Nature (paywalled, alas) both have debilitating chronic versions of long covid or related illnesses & managed to pull this together.

It's hard for healthy people to understand the toll this kind of brain work takes on people with cognitive dysfunction. They deserve huge thanks.

#covid #immunology #MEcfs

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2

There's an interesting new paper in the journal Ecological Economics. The title is:

"Assessing U.S. consumers' carbon footprints reveals outsized impact of the top 1%"

This is from the abstract --

Unsustainable environmental degradation and extreme economic inequality are two of humanity's most pressing challenges. They are intimately linked. Climate-altering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are disproportionately driven by consumption among wealthy and socially privileged groups, yet poorer and socially marginalized peoples face disproportionate climate harms.
________________________

What really grabbed me, however, was the chart below, created by Andrew Fanning using data contained in the paper. It clearly illustrates the massive scale of carbon inequality in our modern society.

#Inequality #GreenhouseGases #Emissions #ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice

I guess I'll end with my usual plea: don't buy Starlink internet. Or if you do, please tell them that you, a paying customer, care about the night sky. They need to make it a priority to make their satellites fainter and use fewer of them - this is a very doable engineering problem that they don't care about right now. There are many other ways to provide internet around the world that don't ruin the night sky and destroy low-Earth orbit.

#SaveTheNightSky

"...the industry’s approach on #climate really hasn’t changed since scientists first started warning that the burning of fossil fuels was becoming a problem: push “solutions” that keep #fossilfuels profitable, downplay climate impacts, overstate the industry’s commitments, and bully the media if they don’t stay on message. It’s the same five-step plan, deployed to the same end: preserving power, subsidies, and social license."
@amywestervelt
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/24/oil-gas-climate-disinformation/ #ClimateChange

Just got word.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy is renewing a legislative push AB813, defeated in 2018, that would *effectively* allow export of coal-fired power from WY to CA & the shutdown of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant. https://bit.ly/3Cwhehu

Truly ... the fossil fuel industry will do ANYTHING to avoid the cessation of operations.

The fight is not over!
#NuclearPower

The German word "hören" means "to hear". But it has funny relatives:

anhören = to listen
zuhören = to listen (a bit more active than anhören)
umhören = to ask around
abhören = to wiretap, to auscultate
überhören = to not hear
erhören = to hear and react to (eg. a plea or a prayer)
gehören = to belong to
angehören = to be a member of
satthören = to get enough of hearing

Should I rather aufhören*? OK.

Enjoy our language!

___________________________

*aufhören = to stop

#TheGermanWord

Oops! I did again:

I created a Twitter account pretending to be @SenMarkey (with his permission) and applied for Blue “verification.”

And once again, Twitter took my $8, asked zero questions and gave the fake account a blue checkmark.

Read @washingtonpost: https://wapo.st/3VHo2Qg

Nuclear #fusion will not only come too late to help solve the #climatecrisis. Even in the long run it will not be the unlimited energy source that some are dreaming of. The reason is basic physics, and anyone can do the back-of-envelope calculation. 🧵1/

Society has a big decision to make: either to listen to climate scientists and protestors, or to ignore and discredit them as the fossil fuel industry and billionaires would prefer, thereby delaying action and irreversibly locking in a much hotter future

This is what BABY JELLYFISH look like!
They are so small they fit in a drop of water and are shaped just like snowflakes.
📽️ me

The transformative changes needed to tackle the climate crisis are happening far too slowly. We argue in Nature Climate Change that a more serious scientific and practical treatment of #feasibility is long overdue.

Feasibility analyses are key to identifying which mitigation initiatives can most effectively change the actions of target actors now and to understanding how to increase the feasibility of transformative initiatives over time.

Free link: rdcu.be/c16zK

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01563-7

Out for an afternoon stroll on the Thames footpath in London. I’m eagerly awaiting my West End stage debut at the Charing Cross Theatre less than two weeks from now!

If you’re in London Jan-Apr, be sure to come see me in Allegiance! https://Allegiancemusical.com

Estimated gender pay gap within job (same occupation at same firm)
🇯🇵 Japan 26%
🇰🇷 S Korea 19%
🇺🇸 US 14%
🇩🇪 Germany 13%
🇪🇸 Spain 12%
🇮🇱 Israel 12%
🇨🇦 Canada 12%
🇳🇴Norway 9%
🇫🇷 France 7%
From study https://nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01470-z#
by @OlivierGodechot & 28 others
Fifth in a 🧵 of #2022TopToots

Tipping point sessions at the next general assembly of the European Geosciences Union

https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU23/session/45542

https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU23/session/46923

“Wood smoke is astonishingly harmful. Though only 8% of households in the UK (mostly wealthy ones) have a wood-burning stove, they release more small particulates (the most dangerous pollutants) than all the vehicles on the road. Even a modern, approved, “eco-friendly” wood burner produces 750 times as many fine particulates as a heavy goods vehicle.”

#AirPollution #ClimateChange #Energy #Wood
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/wood-burning-stove-environment-home-toxins

The shadow docket struck again, this time on Title 42. This latest ruling is part of a larger pattern by SCOTUS, and it carries significant implications for our policies around migrants and the role of the states. I break it down in today’s piece.
https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/scotus-just-deployed-its-most-potent?sd=pf