Just As The Phrase “what The Entire Fuck” Implies The Existence Of Fractional Fucks, The Phrase “what

How many academics does it take to change a lightbulb: one post-doc to write the grant application, three grad students to do the work, and one PI to take the credit

M🌑🌑N ~ 3/1/2019

UN Says Climate Genocide Is Coming. It’s Actually Worse Than That.

The real meaning of the IPCC report isn’t “climate change is worse than you think.” We knew that. It’s “you now have permission to freak out.”

This article will require that you get a bowl of cheerios and a glass of wine, sit in a chair with the blanket around you and your dog or cat next to you, and just zone out. It’s frightening, but it’s not sci-fi (or cli-fi). It’s based on what the scientists are telling us, if we read the actual IPCC report and not just the “what we worry?” summary.

Excerpt:

The new report’s worst-case scenario is, actually, a best case. In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future. The question is how much worse than that it will get.

By and large the consensus is the same: We are on track for four degrees of warming, more than twice as much as most scientists believe is possible to endure without inflicting climate suffering on hundreds of millions or threatening at least parts of the social and political infrastructure we call, grandly, “civilization.” The only thing that changed, this week, is that the scientists, finally, have hit the panic button.

Because the numbers are so small, we tend to trivialize the differences between one degree and two, two degrees and four. Human experience and memory offers no good analogy for how we should think about those thresholds, but with degrees of warming, as with world wars or recurrences of cancer, you don’t want to see even one.

At two degrees, the melting of ice sheets will pass a tipping point of collapse, flooding dozens of the world’s major cities this century. At that amount of warming, it is estimated, global GDP, per capita, will be cut by 13 percent. Four hundred million more people will suffer from water scarcity, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. It will be worse in the planet’s equatorial band. In India, where many cities now numbering in the many millions would become unliveably hot, there would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long and exposing, in total, 93 times more people. This is two degrees — practically speaking, our absolute best-case climate scenario.

And the World War II mobilization metaphor is not hyperbole. To avoid warming of the kind the IPCC now calls catastrophic requires a complete rebuilding of the entire energy infrastructure of the world, a thorough reworking of agricultural practices and diet to entirely eliminate carbon emissions from farming, and a battery of cultural changes to the way those of us in the wealthy West, at least, conduct our lives. And we need to do all of that in two, or possibly three, decades. As a comparison, simply the last phase of the recent three-stop extension of New York City’s Second Avenue subway line took 12 years. All told, from the first groundbreaking, the project took 45 years.

recreational reading

Dale & Karlie | Gold Coast 🇦🇺 on Instagram

10/12/2018

what she says: i’m fine

what she means: isn’t it crazy how the derivative of e^x is e^x? That’s such an arbritrary number isn’t it? At the same time it’s not, though. Because at any point on e^x, the slope is equal to e^x. But at the same time, the integral of e^x is also e^x. so not only is the slope of e^x e^x, the area underneath the graph of e^x is also e^x. Does that not blow your fucking mind?