It won't take much

A person wades through the flood water near the 157th St metro station in New York City on Thursday. Photograph: Stephen Smith/Reuters

For years, the specter of how little it would take to inundate NYC vis a vis gw has never been as clearly shown until tropical storm Elsa made the scene.

Commuters having to wade through waist-deep water on subway concourses, rain cascading directly onto train platforms, desperate motorists rescued by police from their inundated cars – the battering New York City has taken from tropical storm Elsa has raised questions as to how well the metropolis is prepared for the ravages of the climate crisis.

Yes indeed as Manhattan, situated between two rivers and all the power driving the city residing in the subways, gives one pause because ... with just a 6" water rise, NYC becomes toast as the pumps, which already run 24/7 to keep the East River and the Hudson under control, will not be able to keep essential systems dry in any way, shape or fashion. Something to think about don't you think?

Transformation 2Step

This pix seems to capture to yours truly what can happen to earth if we let it. A blackened landscape devoid of life under an enhanced orange sky driven by global warming as the point has past to bandy about theories of why gw is happening vs doing something about it. The great dying has begun and, if nothing is done, will include mankind if we let it. 

In their careful way, scientists are calling for an end to capitalism as we know it

Life is once again headed for total collapse. While coverage of last week’s major Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report on biodiversity loss rightly played up the dire numbers — an estimated 1 million species gone by 2050 — what’s truly remarkable are the solutions the authors offer in response. Ditching the timid pragmatism of technocrats, these scientists are calling for nothing less than the total transformation of the global economy. Producing for profit has failed us, they say, and failed the planet. We need a new system.

BRT has talked about ameliorating the impact of gw in terms of rewilding the world as per David Attenborough and now, IPBES is is talking about it in terms of ending capitalism as said doctrine is all about growth at the expense of earth, something akin to the film Elysium showing the end result of capitalistic driven environmental collapse we are heading for if we don't make the radical changes needed to avoid it.

Only “transformative change” can stop massive species loss, according to the report’s conclusion. That means overhauling the global economy to prioritize human well-being and environmental sustainability rather than the pursuit of profit. “We’re not addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, which is the way we organize economies, production and consumption patterns, our institutions, and our rules,” says Ingrid Visseren-Hamakers, associate professor of environmental science and policy at George Mason University and a coordinating lead author of the IPBES report. “We need to transform the sheer fabric of our society to become more sustainable.”

Exactly.

It can no longer be same as it ever was.

F Prime ... rules :)

 

This illustration shows the Lunar Flashlight spacecraft, a six-unit CubeSat designed to search for ice on the Moon’s surface using special lasers. F Prime is scheduled to run on both this project and Near-Earth Asteroid Scout CubeSat. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Ingenuity's a raging success. Now employed as a scout for Percy, the little chopper is revolutionizing how to explore other worlds using open source code named F Prime.

When NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter hovered above the Red Planet April 19 on its maiden voyage, the moment was hailed as the first instance of powered, controlled flight on another planet. Figuring out how to fly on Mars, where the air is thin but gravity is about a third of that on Earth, took years of work. Along with the challenge of developing a craft that was up to the task, the mission needed software to make the unprecedented flights possible.

So they turned to F Prime, a reusable, multi-mission flight software framework designed for CubeSats, small spacecraft, and instruments. The program was initially developed in 2013 by a team led by Tim Canham at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California with the aim of creating a low-cost, portable, pliable software architecture option that would allow components written for one application to be reused easily in other applications and run on a range of processors.

It gets better.

In 2017, the team pushed for F Prime to be released as open-source, meaning anyone could freely access the software's source code, allowing external collaborators, universities, and the general public to use the framework on their own projects. It is one of hundreds of codes NASA makes available to the public for free, both as open-source or through its software catalog.

How cool is that? :)

A subtle dread ...

This pix, taken on a hot sunny day, sums up, in indirect fashion, what is happening in the world. A subtle dread is finally beginning to take hold on the great unwashed that something's amiss, that something wicked this way comes via global warming, the existential nightmare of our own making. With this in mind, the entertainment industry seems to unconsciously reflect what is happening with fare seemingly forced whether it be a spin off from Monster's Inc. or the SF film The Tomorrow War as we all deflect and try to avoid the unpleasant when viewed, in this case, thru the lens of GW and the changes it's bringing to Earth 

This also applies to politics as the abnormal is the new normal as seen by millions still supporting Trump and the big lie while the US continues to simmer under a burgeoning summer already beset by record breaking temps of a different kind. In a past era, would voting rights be so enthusiastically curtailed by the supremes and state legislatures or science be so completely rejected by those refusing to be vaccinated even though death tolls among these "free and brave" souls trend much higher than fully vaccinated rubes like your truly. Food for thought, eh?

Having read The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, the science rings true as a wet bulb catastrophe described in the book detailing the deaths of millions in India due to a heat wave just like the one experienced by the US and Canada will happen but, in this writer's opinion, it will happen sooner rather than later as the acceleration of GW's on the fast track due to the los of Albedo in the Arctic.

May you live in interesting times ... Chinese Proverb.

Addendum ...  TOPLINE The U.S. is set to deal with yet another scorching heat wave, but this one could be the hottest yet, with Las Vegas expected to flirt with its all-time record high, while more remote areas deal with heat that could rewrite the record books for the whole world.

The cat ...

Reality is quantum, chance rules ... there is no certitude, only probabilities as change is the only constant and ... everything's connected.

During the scientific revolution, the English physics pioneer Isaac Newton and his German counterpart Gottfried Leibniz disagreed on the nature of space and time.

Newton claimed space and time acted like a “container” for the contents of the universe. That is, if we could remove the contents of the universe – all the planets, stars, and galaxies – we would be left with empty space and time. This is the “absolute” view of space and time.

Leibniz, on the other hand, claimed that space and time were nothing more than the sum total of distances and durations between all the objects and events of the world. If we removed the contents of the universe, we would remove space and time also. This is the “relational” view of space and time: they are only the spatial and temporal relations between objects and events. The relational view of space and time was a key inspiration for Einstein when he developed general relativity.

Rovelli makes use of this idea to understand quantum mechanics. He claims the objects of quantum theory, such as a photon, electron, or other fundamental particle, are nothing more than the properties they exhibit when interacting with – in relation to – other objects.

These properties of a quantum object are determined through experiment, and include things like the object’s position, momentum, and energy. Together they make up an object’s state.

The cat ...

According to orthodox quantum theory, the cat is neither dead nor alive until we open the box and observe the system. A puzzle remains concerning what it would be like for the cat, exactly, to be neither dead nor alive.

But according to the relational interpretation, the state of any system is always in relation to some other system. So the quantum process in the box might have an indefinite outcome in relation to us, but have a definite outcome for the cat.

So it is perfectly reasonable for the cat to be neither dead nor alive for us, and at the same time to be definitely dead or alive itself. One fact of the matter is real for us, and one fact of the matter is real for the cat. When we open the box, the state of the cat becomes definite for us, but the cat was never in an indefinite state for itself.

In the relational interpretation there is no global, “God’s eye” view of reality.

End result

On this view, the world is an intricate web of interrelations, such that objects no longer have their own individual existence independent from other objects – like an endless game of quantum mirrors. Moreover, there may well be no independent “metaphysical” substance constituting our reality that underlies this web.

Reminds one of the Tao does it not?

 

Eyes wide shut

Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2016 (Getty)

No love lost for Rumsfeld, one of the chief architects of Shock & Awe, the worst strategic initiative this country has ever done (aka brain fart) but this isn't the first time US foreign policy erred as seen by Nam, a fiasco of biblical proportions also started by a lie like that of W's Shock & Awe.

Because while Rumsfeld might have (mostly) vanished from public life 15 years ago, his vision of defense policy lived on. To be sure, the military is still vast and lumbering. But the doctrine of preemptively attacking terrorists with as little manpower as possible, sans the nation-building Rumsfeld so deplored, has now been institutionalized at the highest levels of government. The result has been a war on terror fought remotely and without end. Its initial idealism — we will ‘rid the world of evil!’ as President Bush tub-thumped after 9/11 — has given way to a slow burn of aerial attacks and killings, roiling nations while ensuring both that we never quite win and never quite lose.

All the presidents since Bush have pledged to repudiate Rumsfeld in some way, yet none have managed to do so. Instead they’ve only cemented his legacy (what could be lighter and nimbler than a drone strike?). And it’s here that we arrive back at all those obituaries. A writer at the Nation, for example, excoriates Rumsfeld because the airstrikes he ordered against Iraq ‘kept managing to hit funeral processions and wedding parties and markets’. The Saudis committed similar atrocities in Yemen with full support and weapons provided by the Obama administration. Yet somehow it’s difficult to imagine the Nation — good work though they do — eulogizing Obama with even a shred of the opprobrium they reserved for Rumsfeld.

Obama started an illegal war that helped wreck Libya, inflamed the violence in Syria, godfathered our modern drone war, had an American citizen assassinated and wielded the Espionage Act as a weapon against whistleblowers and journalists. Yet is the Atlantic ever going to malign his brutality and incompetence the same way they just did Rumsfeld’s? Is New York magazine? Will Hillary Clinton be trashed upon her death for convincing Obama to invade Libya? Will John Kerry be filleted for his warmongering against Bashar al-Assad? What about Madeleine Albright and her rationalization of our de facto genocide against the Iraqis in 1996? Will that even make her obit amid all the predictable ‘Madam Secretary’ nonsense?

 

The reason Rumsfeld is being attacked isn’t just because he was a failed warlord, though he was. It’s because he’s an easy piñata. He’s a convenient scapegoat for all of America’s foreign policy failures over the last 20 years, even as he was only in office for five of them. Arrogant, self-assured, white, male, right-wing, no longer able to hit back — who better to absorb all of our Mesopotamian sins and carry them off into the wilderness? Trashing him exposes the double standard that the Establishment applies to public figures it likes. It enables the left to ignore that Rumsfeldism has become systemic inside the same government whose expansion they view as salvific.

Eyes wide shut indeed.

121.3 & climbing ...

Yours truly won't wax poetic about crimes against humanity perpetrated by big oil save for the fact  Exxon knew about global warming back in 1979 but decided to lie about it in order to gin ever more profits for invested parties instead of warning the world about a possible dire future if nothing was done. Well ... nothing was done and here we are in 2021 seeing the first salvo of a hellscape coming our way 24/7.

To whit ...

Last week, I noted that on June 27, Canada smashed its all-time heat record with a temperature of 116 degrees Fahrenheit, besting the previous record by three whole degrees. It turns out that was just the start: The same small town of Lytton that broke the national record broke it again the next day by hitting 118 degrees, and a third time the following day with a temperature of 121.3 degrees — or more than eight degrees higher than any previous recorded temperature in Canadian history.

"This is the most anomalous regional extreme heat event to occur anywhere on Earth since temperature records began. Nothing can compare," weather historian Christopher Burt told Yale Climate Connections. The heat roasted the forests surrounding Lytton, accelerating wildfires that produced their own "pyroculmulus" storms, creating more lightning and even more blazes. The day after setting the record, fire ripped through Lytton and burned it to the ground just 15 minutes after the first appearance of smoke.

Exxon's 2021 response ...

During that same period last week, Greenpeace published a recording of an ExxonMobil lobbyist, Keith McCoy, in which he boasted about working with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and the Biden administration to weaken Democrats' climate policy, discussed the company's role in funding climate denial, and suggested the company's support of a carbon tax is purely a "talking point" because they expect it will never happen. (The company denied this was true, but there's no reason to take their word for it.)

The "what if" scenario

If the same scale of heat wave had hit a poor, densely populated country, the death toll would be exponentially greater. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson's recent book The Ministry of the Future opens with a gripping, terrifying account of a near-future heat wave in India that kills 20 million people in a matter of weeks.

Absent a Second World War-scale global policy mobilization that is nowhere in sight, something like Robinson's scenario is absolutely certain to happen somewhere on the planet, sooner or later. Here's why: Beyond a "wet-bulb" temperature of about 95 degrees (the combined heat and humidity level at which the body can no longer cool itself by sweating), no human being can survive for long and even the healthiest person sitting motionless in the shade will cook themselves to death from the inside within a few hours.

Any questions?

A save for wildlife

 

Surprise, DeSantis and the repugs did a big save for wildlife.

This week, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who is known nationally for his unstinting impersonation of the state’s most famous new resident, signed into law a remarkable piece of environmental legislation that could become a model for the rest of the country. The project will establish the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a blueprint for the state to connect all of its large national and state parks with tracts of open land. The corridor, once complete, would create an unbroken swath of preserved land from the Alabama state line all the way to the Florida Keys, nearly eight hundred miles away. It would insure that a population of wildlife—whether it be black bears or panthers or gopher tortoises—would not be cut off from other groups of its species, which is one of the main drivers of extinction.

Remarkable without question.

Fashionista 101

I resemble that remark. :)

Early Summer

Summer's here, complete with flowers, insects, a frog or two and an inquisitive deer. Enjoy.