Rooney’s old account @girls_can@social.cleverlibre.org

Headlines around the world have been overwhelmed with the impacts of climate change-fueled extremes on people and places. Extreme heatwaves, flash floods, continuous wildfires, record-breaking ocean temps and more: all are being super-sized by our warming planet.

Surely, you think, surely THIS will galvanize action? And to a certain extent, it does.

Seeing people, places, and things we love being impacted dismantles a main barrier to climate action: psychological distance. Research I did with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that hot, dry extremes do make people more aware of & concerned about climate change.

But there are other, greater barriers to climate action. The first is lack of efficacy; i.e. if I do something, will it make a difference? In the US, over 70% are already alarmed or concerned, but 50% feel helpless & don't know what to do to make a difference. For them, as this diagram below explains, more fear-based messaging just paralyzes them even further.

For the 20% dismissive or doubtful, their barrier is solution aversion. They're convinced climate action is worse than inaction; that it will rob them of their profits, their freedom, or their ideology. Often they begin with science-y sounding objections (it's the sun! CO2 is plant food!) but within the next breath they'll be talking about the EPA taking away their gas stove or about how they need a gas-powered truck. For them, more evidence for harmful impacts just hardens their resolve to "fight back."

That's why, when we talk about climate change, it's essential to pair negative info about the risks with positive info about what we as individuals can do to make a difference and what we as a society can do, and the benefits of those actions for us today, as well as for climate tomorrow.

The goal isn't to have the entire world paralyzed by anxiety: it's to have the world galvanized for action. And for that, we need hope; not false hope that everything will be okay (because it won't be, if we don't act) but hope tied to action and efficacy -- the conviction that if we do something, it WILL make a difference.

They are intentionally framing climate and COVID as problems for individuals to deal with to distract us from holding the powerful accountable.

We are f-ed!

And all our leaders talk about is the freaking Ukraine and how we need to destroy Russia.

#WeDontHaveTime #Politics #ClimateChange #ClimateCatastrophe #ClimateEmergency #TomorrowIsTooLate #GlobalWarming #Environment

The far right previously said that we can't have fun if we have seatbelts, condoms, or smoke-free bars. None of that has panned out to be remotely true. It's the same thing with COVID precautions.

@gmoretti @girls_can “Thixotropy” is the $10 word for that weird property. It is thixotropic.

@girls_can The mixture of cornflower and water is fun too. It has the weird property that you can put your hands in it and lift it up and it'll slide off, but if you move fast, it instantly hardens. I've seen a Uni "Open-day" demo with a bath of the stuff. You could jump on and off again quickly, but if too slow, you'd sink into the ooze.

No idea how someone thought this up, but putting it on a vibrating speaker gives odd results- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zoTKXXNQIU

Under 8 years of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (2015-2023):
2016 — $3.2 Billion Surplus
2018 — $3.1 Billion Surplus
2021 — $3.58 Billion Surplus
2022 — $5.3 Billion Surplus
2023 — $1.5 Billion Surplus

Under PM Harper, 8 consecutive deficits, 2 recessions, and ZERO confirmed surpluses in 9 years (2006-2015)! #Poilievre wants to take our economy back to the Harper era!

This is why the better educated a Canadian is the more they support Trudeau!
#NeverVoteConservative

"Conservative leader Pierre #Poilievre peddles the same failed policies of Stephen Harper from a bygone era that completely disregarded Canadian values in order to try force rigid, religious ideological views, secrecy, contempt of parliament and science destruction on a country that never wanted it."

#cdnpoli #conservative #rightwing #canada @mrdash109
70 Harper government assaults on democracy and the law.

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/08/10/Harper-Abuses-of-Power-Final/

#NeverVoteConservative

@girls_can was chatting with Rachel at ELA about lab groups, what do you think a nice steady state lab size is?

@girls_can you're entirely right about needing the overlap to keep the knowledge passed on (because we don't write enough of it down.) 6±2 seems good. Enough so they feel like a group and there are cohorts but it's not out of control. The trick is recruiting good people at the right times.

@girls_can oh, that's so many and you get spread so thin. It's like there's a size that's too small to hire a layer of postdocs to help with the mentoring but too big for one PI.

Apparently, the Bible verses about a talking snake are literal, but the part about forgiving everyone's debt is just a metaphor.

Always looking for creative ways to explain concepts to students, I recently coined a new definition of hypothesis that I've started using in the classroom.

Hypothesis: an idea begging for evidence.

Hospital-acquired COVID infections worsened as the pandemic progressed, research finds https://bit.ly/3YeOUd9 #COVIDOntario #Hospitals #COVID19 #OntarioHospitals #Coronavirus #onpoli @ontariogreens @barrie @onpoli