RE: https://indieweb.social/@tchambers/117457925467251228
Meta messing with Indivisible just as No Kings begins. SpaceX shutting down Starlink right when the Russians launch a deadly attack on Ukraine. Meta censoring Lula and promoting Bolsonaro days before the Brazilian election.
This is the future that big tech has given us. This is where we are today...
This week's collection includes 143 academic research papers plus 16 government/NGO reports.
Extra interesting:
* Fingerprint Evidence for Human Effects on Climate: Advances After the 2009 Endangerment Finding
* Extreme Heat and Rainfall Risk Attributed to Cumulative CO2 Emissions From Fossil Fuel Producers
* Record-setting heavy precipitation occurrence in 2024
* A recent doubling of global warming rate signals a 1.5 °C breach by 2028
* Learning from young conservatives: Increasing pro-environmental behavior change and climate policy support in the United States
* Spinning Renewable Success Into a Climate Conspiracy: Co-opting the climate science story of RCP8.5
* Manufacturing Petropopulism: Exposing the secretive network of front groups shilling for Big Oil in Canada
* The AI Gas Rush: Risks and Implications of “Bring Your Own Power”
The Myth of “Baseload” Power in Modern Power Grids
https://policyintegrity.org/publications/detail/the-myth-of-baseload-power-in-modern-power-grids
Happy #VoteEarlyDay to all who celebrate. #NoKings
Or, if you're going with the Fire Service format, this is known as an After Action Review (AAR), which is extremely helpful for EVERYTHING in life. I have found I very much appreciate this from the fire service culture.
NCWG:
This is the AAR format originally developed by the U.S. Army. It is now used worldwide by other military organizations, government agencies, and private industry. The wildland fire support reference for this can be found in the NWCG Incident Response Pocket Guide (IRPG), PMS 461.
1. What was planned? (Spend about 25% of total time on this question and the next)
Review the intent of the mission
Key task assignments.
Desired "End State" (what does "Right" look like).
2. What actually happened?
Establish the facts
Pool multiple perspectives to build a shared picture of what happened.
3. Why did it happen? (Spend about 25% of total time on this question)
Analysis of cause and effect
Focus on WHAT, not WHO.
Provide progressive refinement for drawing out explanations of what occurred.
4. What are we going to do next time? (Spend about 50% of total time on this question)
Correct Weaknesses - Focus on items you can fix, rather than external forces outside of your control.
Sustain/Maintain Strengths - Identify areas where groups are performing well and should sustain. This will help repeat success and create a balanced approach to the AAR.
Details of thawing permafrost methane retention are important to investigate because:
"Permafrost and submarine gas hydrate sediments represent two of the largest natural reservoirs of methane on Earth and play a critical role in the global carbon cycle. In the Northern Hemisphere alone, permafrost soils store an estimated 1,700 Gt of organic carbon, approximately twice the amount of carbon currently present in the atmosphere. In addition to organic carbon, permafrost environments frequently host free gas accumulations and are often spatially associated with gas hydrate–bearing sediments, particularly in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions and beneath subsea permafrost."
Results suggest a threshold of high fragility, unreliability for containment:
"Overall, the results demonstrate that gas breakthrough in permafrost is governed by a complex interplay among unfrozen water content, tensile resistance, cryogenic suction, stress state, and thermal history. Importantly, modest gas overpressures, within the range inferred from field observations, may trigger abrupt gas release once critical conditions are reached, particularly during thawing. These findings provide experimental constraints for incorporating physically based breakthrough criteria into models of permafrost degradation and methane emissions and underscore the importance of accounting for both thermal hysteresis and mechanical confinement when assessing climate-driven feedbacks in cold-region environments."
#methane
#ClimateChange
#PermafrostDegradation
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/environmental-science/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2026.1820261/full
This figures. Turning over one's sense of curiosity to a machine seems crisply diagnostic of whether one is interested in how the world works.
Personal observation pertaining to the final sentence: "whale watching" as it's done in typical commercial tourist operations using powered vessels is whale harassment. In the US the legal distance is 100 yards, effectively no distance at all from the perspective of the whales and how they operate. Keeping a crowd of gawkers at 100 yards requires chasing the animals and the vessels adapted for this are axiomatically loud and obnoxious.
''Climate change and other anthropogenic pressures are rapidly reshaping marine ecosystems, altering prey availability and predator interactions. Yet empirical evidence of how these relationships shift under changing conditions remains scarce. Drawing on over a decade of monitoring in a subarctic fjord system, we provide a rare insight into these dynamics. In northern Norway, the winter aggregation of herring (Clupea harengus) and their primary predator, the killer whale (Orcinus orca), has shifted northward under the combined influence of climate change and fishing pressure. This redistribution has brought baleen whales into the same foraging grounds, leading to direct interference competition. Humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) frequently intrude into killer whale carousel feeding events, exploiting dense, shallow prey patches optimized for lunge feeding. Such intrusions often end hunts prematurely, imposing energetic costs on killer whales. Meanwhile, the rapid growth of whale-watching tourism in these fjords further disrupts foraging activity.''
One of the ecology postgrads working with me at the moment, Dee Patel, has spent this year doing lots of data curation work, and now stats analysis, on my 23-years of ongoing high frequency bird counts between Ōtautahi-Christchurch city and Lincoln town in Canterbury, NZ. That's where I repeatedly map and count birds while biking and running along 172 km of standard routes about the landscape.
This week Dee got the first preliminary results for all birds and one clear story is worth sharing: of the ~21 species of native and endemic birds that were seen often enough to be able to analyse a trend, *ALL* have increased in numbers over the past two decades.
All of them!!
Many have increased by large amounts, and on average, the NZ endemics are up more than the natives we share with other countries.
Over the same period, the introduced birds (mostly English birds) have mostly stayed about the same, with just a few declines (eg Muscovy duck are down a bit).
It's a strikingly different result from what's been reported in the media from some other parts of the world. I expect it's due to the big increases here in regeneration and planting of native vegetation and mammalian predator control, leading to a resurgence of native species in areas where they'd declined last century. We've also had the agricultural intensification and urban expansion and warming climate seen in most of the world, but those negative effects on birds seem to (so far) have been more than offset by the return of native vegetation and reduction in predators.
Dee's due to complete and submit her thesis early next year so there's still plenty of work to do before we get the details ironed out and figure out all the nuances in the story. Still, the overall result is looking really promising for the city's birds.
#birds #Ōtautahi #Christchurch #nz #ecology #LincolnUniversityNZ
We'll be able to report on neighborhood #ClimateChaos via #qrp! LA -->> Oahu on 100mW, no problemo!
"Under global warming, the marine atmospheric boundary layer shows an increase in lower-tropospheric stratification. These thermodynamic shifts alter vertical refractivity gradients and can modulate atmospheric ducts, which are natural waveguides crucial for beyond-line-of-sight electromagnetic propagation. Using ERA5 reanalysis data from 1940 to 2025, we find a global-scale intensification of atmospheric ducts over oceans at mid- to low-latitude, with a robust increasing trend in atmospheric duct occurrence probability, strength and top height. Mechanistically, this intensification is intrinsically coupled with the sustained increase in static stability in the marine atmospheric boundary layer. Although interannual climate modes, such as the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, modulate these anomalies, the long-term warming trend dominates the long-term trend. Ultimately, continuous warming is shifting the marine atmospheric background state towards a highly stratified regime favouring more frequent and intense ducting, with implications for global maritime communication, radar and navigation systems."
My best friend's contractor didn't show for work yesterday.
Last night, his brother showed up and knocked on his door.
"My brother was picked up by ICE at his immigration hearing. When he called me, he told me to come to your house and finish the job." They gave him money and told him to go home.
My friend found a lawyer for the contractor last night, but as he said, "I'm not sure if I'm more shaken as an American or as a Jew."
We have to end this nightmare.
Come to think of it the prior US civil war was about theft on an epic scale featuring depraved cruelty.
And so it is now; desperation to interfere with this election threatening a wave of truth and justice is fundamentally about corrupt enrichment hand-in-hand with inhumane behavior.
Ok for DoJ to destroy records of a case it's actively pursuing, the purpose of the case being to punish a person who was following the law in pursuit of people breaking the law.
Strange times.
https://apnews.com/article/brennan-cia-justice-department-b270554efce62124cd8a6644b3ec56e5
So it's civil war, of a kind.
This is funny but the plan is to "sequester" potentially thousands of ballots already cast. That's not funny.
"Secretary of State Weber revealed that the “password-protected thumb drive” containing the Trump DOJ’s list of “likely noncitizen voters” that McCotter references in his letters was accompanied by a sticky note with the password on it. Top notch information security going on there at the Trump DOJ."
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trump-doj-now-targeting-ballots-not-just-voter-rolls
'In April of last year, Donald Trump’s administration halted work on a climate science report that the United States had been producing for over 20 years. The congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment (NCA) is meant to give Americans a clear view of how climate change is impacting the nation. The government fired hundreds of scientists and researchers who were working on the latest edition.
Now, many of these scientists have released the first of a series of reports meant to look at how climate research has progressed since the last NCA in 2023, and where climate research could go next. The report was published in two scientific journals at once, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and Earth’s Future to reach a larger audience.
This effort is called the U.S. Climate Collection. The report isn’t a replacement for the NCA, but it does help contextualize what’s happened with climate research in recent years as Trump has called the climate crisis a “hoax” and undercut the government’s ability to combat it.""
Sounding the Alarm
"As senior experts in our field [insurance], we are deeply concerned that the level of physical climate and environmental risk we are seeing is increasing at a dangerous rate. The frequency, severity, and unpredictability of hazards are broadly increasing, as are the exposure and vulnerability of many parts of society to these hazards."
Good to get this sorted out before it becomes a hobby horse of denial for interested parties.
"We generated a data set that comprised 746 release or non-release events at a fixed location near Casa Grande, Arizona, in 2025. This included measurements of 481 controlled releases with rates ranging from 10 to 1,200 kilograms of CH4 per hour, which is typical of real-world point sources such as landfills and oil and gas facilities, and 265 blank control events, in which no methane was released when the satellite passed over the site. The procedures for gas release and data reporting followed established protocols3.
Our team provided gas flow rates and a suite of meteorological measurements in a publicly accessible data set4. The satellite data were analysed independently by 15 teams from a broad global consortium of academic, government, non-profit and commercial organizations.
Satellites that were purpose-built for methane detection, such as Tanager-1 and GHGSat, performed best, with high true positive rates, largely unbiased quantification and few to no false positives for releases ranging from less than 100 to more than 1,000 kilograms of CH4 per hour (Fig. 1). Several teams that analysed multipurpose hyperspectral instruments, such as the German EnMAP and the Italian PRISMA satellites, also performed well.
Methane detection outcomes across satellites and analysis teams reveal that dedicated methane-monitoring instruments had the highest detection rates and that performance varied for multipurpose and global-scanning satellites.
Teams using AI-based methods reached detection accuracies of 0.62–0.77 (well above chance). However, most of the false positives came from commercial teams that applied AI methods to data from the European satellite Sentinel-2 and Landsat (a satellite run by the US Geological Survey and NASA), underscoring the need for continued development to improve reliability."
An imaginative and cool use of Apollo spacecraft comms recordings.
"How do expert teams manage uncertainty and emotion when lives depend on coordinated performance? We present the first dual-channel analysis of team cognition in action: how a crew distributes information, coordination and affect between its private (crew-to-crew) and public (crew-to-ground) channels across a complete spaceflight mission. All 13,114 Apollo 11 statements (161,954 words) were coded with a validated six-category taxonomy and an emotional valence scheme. The crew expressed uncertainty at more than double the rate privately (21.11%) compared with the public channel (10.28%), while negative affect was four times more prevalent in private communication (2.82% versus 0.71%). This pattern persisted during the life-threatening descent and landing sequence. The private channel supported iterative uncertainty processing, with an uncertainty statement followed by further uncertainty in 18.78% of cases privately against 8.46% publicly, while the public channel exhibited a tight information–confirmation protocol. An expert team can thus actively partition cognitive and affective processing even under genuine life-or-death conditions, with implications for communication architecture, training and crew autonomy in future deep-space missions."