[JuanP]

I am also in favor of reducing excessive consumption.

That is a good approach. But to be meaningful you need to drop the consumption well below what's considered US poverty level.

I think that will be hard for you to achieve, as I understand you currently lead a miami beach jet set lifestyle. Rumors go, with money stolen from the Uruguayan people thru some military junta? People even say you had to depart from Uruguay in a hurry? But who am I to judge?

I do live in a friend's 1,000 sqft Miami Beach oceanfront condo with a direct ocean view that I rent for $1,200 a month, well below market rates. The condo unit would be sitting empty, if I wasn't living in it, like it did for about a decade before my wife and I moved in, because my friend doesn't want to be bothered with tenants because he doesn't need or want the money or the hassle. Not that I think it matters because I believe it is decades too late to try and do anything about Climate Change.

I never stole anything and neither did my family. My family is wealthy, but my wife and I have always supported ourselves independently. We have been working class taxpayers in the USA for 30 years. I emancipated myself at the age of 16 because I was a victim of child abuse.

The person who started those lies and rumors about me is Davy AKA REAL Green. You can choose to believe his lies if you prefer. It makes absolutely no difference to me whether you choose to believe me or not. I am not responsible for your thoughts, ideas, or actions, only my own. Your choices reflect what you are, not what I am.

I won't judge you, either, but you may end up on my ignore list together with REAL Green, if your noise to signal ratio gets too high. Your post above is 100% noise and didn't contribute ANYTHING useful to the conversation.

[mousepad]

I do live in a friend's 1,000 sqft Miami Beach oceanfront condo with a direct ocean view that I rent for $1,200 a month, well below market rates. The condo unit would be sitting empty, if I wasn't living in it, like it did for about a decade before my wife and I moved in, because my friend doesn't want to be bothered with tenants because he doesn't need or want the money or the hassle.

I understand that your friends doesn't want the hassle of renters. I'm thinking the same way.
However it is certainly strange that he wouldn't sell the unit then, be done and gone with it.
A structure is hassle to begin with, maintenance, permits, taxes, squatters and much more.

But you understand that getting the apartment for "well below market rate" doesn't relief you from the guilt of consumption.
Just because a person gifts me gasoline for free doesn't mean I'm not guilty of using it.

A 1000 sq ft apartment runs at about $3k in Miami Beach. Even if you're not paying for it, you're still living the high life.
Good for you. I hope you enjoy it.

Ever considered to live the way you preach? In a trailer in a small rural town?

[Newfie]

Matrimonial style bickering deleted.

[Newfie]

I thought this was a really good article from our front page.

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/12/to-sa ... s-new-map/

[careinke]

I thought this was a really good article from our front page.

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/12/to-sa ... s-new-map/

It looks like propaganda for the great reset. You can't regenerate the earth without animals.

Personally I'd rather not be forced to live in high density cities.

[Newfie]

Yup, nothin favor of that part of it for sure. Having escaped several decades in a large city we have NO desire to return.

Yet that may be learned behavior. I know many who feel just the opposite.

Chicken Coop Earth, they love it.

[JuanP]

"Heat Records, Oxygen on Everest, and More Climate Science During the Pandemic"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... f=fyhEsXfZ

"No matter how often we hit one, a global temperature record never gets less shocking.
Nineteen of the 20 hottest years on record have occurred in this century—which is only 20 years old. The last six years have been the hottest in the 140-year record. This year will extend that run to seven and may even top the list, according to a recent analysis by CarbonBrief.org.
...
Arctic sea ice fell to its second-smallest area ever at the end of the Northern summer. The smallest 14 sea-ice extents have come in the last 14 years."

Nothing to see here! We all know that Global Warming and Climate Change are not real. The planet has always been cooling or warming and the climate has always been changing, yet we are still here and stronger than ever!

[ralfy]

EXACTLY! But the opposite is also true. Even if the consumption is tiny, yet there are billions over billions in population, the consumption will be huge.

Me, I prefer a tiny population that can live in luxury as opposed to a large population living in poverty.

The only way a small population can live in luxury is through incredible levels of automation, where almost all labor involves machines. In short, a sci-fi world.

In contrast is the present population, where a small population relies on a larger one for labor plus automation as well as consumption, as much of their wealth is based on numbers which increase as sales and returns from financial speculation rise.

[dohboi]

Anthropocene is heavy...human-made objects now outweigh all life on earth

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/the-an ... -on-earth/

As human consumption and pollution have led to a reduction in the Earth’s biodiversity, those same activities have helped to create so many human-made objects that the weight of such materials is expected to exceed that of all people, other living animals, and plants by the end of 2020.

Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Rehovot, Israel, published (pdf) a study in Nature on Wednesday showing that the weight of all human-made objects, or “anthropogenic mass”—including automobiles, buildings, roads, and smaller plastics and other materials—is estimated at one teratonne, or one trillion metric tons.

[Plantagenet]

There was an interview with John Kerry, Biden's new "Climate Czar," on NPR this morning.

Kerry actually mentioned the fact that China is funding new coal-fired power plants all across Asia and said that it has to stop.

I was amazed! Usually the Ds are pretty careful not to criticize China.

Maybe there is hope that John Kerry will continue to call out China on their immense CO2 pollution.....

if we want to stop global warming we've got to get China to reduce their CO2 emissions and that starts with being honest about what a problem it is......and so far John Kerry is doing good!

Cheers!

[REAL Green]

Look where the worst air pollution is:

"MAPPED: WHICH COUNTRIES HAVE THE WORST AIR POLLUTION?"
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inli ... k=6-ERoA2E

"A clear correlation emerges: some of the most inhabited places in the world also experience the most pollution. Highly populated China and India show up the most prominently, while other countries like Australia and Canada seem to disappear off the map entirely. To put this into perspective, 800 dark brown squares on this cartogram (a PM2.5 concentration of 50 μg/m³) represent 400 million people in India that are exposed to polluted air at levels five times past thresholds set by the World Health Organization."

[Newfie]

Thats a weird ass map with all those 45° swaths. Maybe its not displaying correctly on my phone.

[REAL Green]

Thats a weird ass map with all those 45° swaths. Maybe its not displaying correctly on my phone.

same on my laptop

[dissident]

Thats a weird ass map with all those 45° swaths. Maybe its not displaying correctly on my phone.

The map is fine. But the choice of shading is distracting. India has a PM 2.5 problem from biomass burning including for farming and domestic cooking. The aerosol problem in China is due to the enormous number of coal power plants and generally lax air quality standards. The Beijing haze is something special.

Another strange choice in this map is to scale countries by their population size. Methinks they are overloading it. If you want to show air pollution loading, you do not need to throw in population size. Aerosol pollution is related to total population size but that is not the prime parameter. Back in 1960 the USA, especially in California, was singular.

[Newfie]

Dis,

This is what I see.

[dissident]

That is what I see.

The colour of the bars reflects the concentration of aerosol particles in the fine mode (PM 2.5). So China and India are brown. Countries with lower concentrations have the colours shift towards the blue-green end of the spectrum. The shape of the country reflects its population size. So Canada looks like a thin layer on the northern border of the USA. The USA is blue-green because it is much cleaner in PM 2.5 terms compared to India and China.

It is a convoluted way of presenting the data. They should just use a single shade proportional to the average concentration levels for each country with the concentration colours shown on a continuous range bar. And they should leave the size of the countries untouched (for the given map projection).

[dissident]

Here is a better example of graphing PM 2.5:

https://arcg.is/0j0D49

[Newfie]

Dis,

Thank you.

Yes much better. But still lacking some useful granularity. For example all of California is a single color.

But surely more useful than the other one.

[JuanP]

"The stormy, fiery year when climate disasters wouldn't stop"
https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-wi ... 55d73ab728

"Nature struck relentlessly in 2020 with record-breaking and deadly weather- and climate-related disasters.

With the most named storms in the Atlantic, the largest-ever area of California burned by wildfires, killer floods in Asia and Africa and a hot, melting Arctic, 2020 was more than a disastrous year with the pandemic. It was a year of disasters — and climate change from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas was a big factor, scientists said.

The United States didn’t just set a record for the most disasters costing at least $1 billion — adjusted for inflation — the nation obliterated the record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."

As if the COVID-19 pandemic mismanagement and the consequent global economic recession hadn't been enough! I wonder whether 2021 will be better or worse than 2020; we will definitely be starting next year from a worse situation considering how bad things are right now.

[dissident]

Dis,

Thank you.

Yes much better. But still lacking some useful granularity. For example all of California is a single color.

But surely more useful than the other one.

I see what you wanted, an actual averaged surface PM2.5 field.



The aerosol optical depth (AOD) is a useful field which is a measure of total column loading: