ALBANIA PROMISES NET-ZERO ART BY EARTH DAY 2025

Sailing to Venice for the Biennale?   Put in to Putin's favorite cruising ground and check out the Heads of Heads Of State scene in  Albania's contemporary art capital, Fushë-Krujë!

Wonders await along the Côte Concrèt of Nato's 28th nation! the pillbox studded cultured pearl of the Adriatic hosts monumental cat paintings by Xhorxh H. Busj

in a venue overlooked by a colossal bronze of the former President on a plinth  formerly occupied by heroic statues of  Fearless Peoples Republic of Sqip Leader Enver Hoxa, and his predecessor King Zog .

Albania's Illyrian Coast  has sucked tourists ashore like Charybdis by turning a phalanx of iron-clad coastal bunkers into a pantheon of bronze colossi honoring  both Chief Executives and Vice-Presidential Chiefs Of Staff like  Agnew mentor Artur Smër, Loyal Cheney lieutenant Skotor Libbë and Dan Quayle Brain Trust head Vlym Xristol 

The Post-Palladian architecture of this  Albanian New Atlantis eclipses even Skagway & Atlantic City, drawing National Review, New Republic and Nation seminar cruise patrons  to admire the  ancestral home of John Belushi,  Mother Teresa International Airport, and Fushë-Krujë where Bush's whirlwind Balkans tour  ended in 2007

While crushing revisionist rumors that bronze colossus of Bush celebrates NATO ridding Albanians of Kosovo or Kosovo of Albanians, Fushë-Krujënes admit masterpiece was cast ex voto in apology for local fans removing wristwatch from Presidential wrist as  he worked  welcoming crowd in 2007.

Jeremy Grantham: Bubbles, AI, Climate Change, Population Growth

 

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THERE IS ALWAYS BUSINESS IN GREAT WATERS

 

 On  January 9 the BBC reported on the plastic nurdle crisis , as a spill  lashed the Iberian coast with  the force of a thousand pool noodles 

"More than 1,000 sacks of pellets  known as nurdles ... have fallen from the Liberian flagged freighter Toconao, some 50 miles west of VigoThe tiny plastic balls used to make water bottles ... are less than 5mm wide, making cleaning up extremely difficult. Volunteers… combing through sand and sieving water to find the plastic pellets... accused Spain's Socialist-led national government of failing to inform local authorities. The crisis is reminiscent of Spain's worst ever… "

While the BBC valiantly strove to persuade viewers that  pellets EU approved for food container  must be as bad as a crude oil spill, an article entitled 

The water footprint of tourism in Spain

in the flagship journal of plastic bottle & spork  studies :

Tourism Management 

 

Author links open overlay panel

REVEALED THE NURDLE TSUNAMI CONTAINED LESS PLASTIC THAN THE WATER BOTTLES  SPANISH TOURISTS DISCARD IN  DAY. 

Now comes word of an intelligent spin-off from well publicized  but largely unsuccessful efforts to find and recover plastic trash on the high seas. It has long been noted that rivers run down to the sea, and that the flotsam  chucked into them often outweighs the jetsam jettisoned by coastal vessels plying the seas into which they flow. How much more?

Here's a days catch by a modestly sized but cleverly located boom  in the delta of one of the many tropical rivers that drain the hinterlands of the Spanish Main:  1,421,000 kg of plastic bottles, enough to yield a thousand tonnes of recycled nurdles and assure the sustainability of the tourist water bottle ecosystem for generations to come.

A solution to the more difficult  problem of Central America being a lee shore downwind of all the thirsty tourists in the Caribbean  remains to be discovered.

THE DELUGE : GRETA AVANT ET STEVE APRES

A Planetary Crisis  Awaits the Next President

April 20, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET

                   THE LATEST NY TIMES SCREED ON DEATH BY CLIMATE COMES

                                  FROM  STEPHEN KING ENDORSED NOVELIST WHO HAS NO FEAR OF BIDEN'S MULTI-TRILLION ALTERNATIVE ENERGY TAX CREDIT MUTATING INTO A POSTERITY ENSLAVING NATIONAL DEBT !

HERE  IS MARKLEY'S  WIRED  PODCAST CONFESSION :

Gideon Lichfield: So, in the book, one of the most interesting things that happens politically is that a schism emerges within conservatism, even as there's this increasing climate denialism as a feature of the right. There is also a conservative president who's elected on a green platform. In the book, the climate activists help bring about that schism by crossing political divides and appealing to Republicans. Do you see any sign of that happening in our real world today?

Stephen Markley: I've long seen those signs. There's a former congressman named Bob Inglis who I think deserves way more credit than he ever gets for being a sort of tireless advocate for climate. He lost in the Tea Party wave back in 2010 and got absolutely hammered because he was like, “Yeah, I believe the science, and I think we should do something about this crisis.” After he was voted out, he spent his entire life basically talking to all the people the climate movement would never talk to. Going on conservative talk shows, going on the radio, just sort of endlessly humping that Sisyphean boulder up the hill. And I do think—and I get these emails and comments from people—that there are more, especially young Republicans and young conservatives who don't have their heads buried in the sand on this, but they also operate within an ecosystem where the mouthpieces and the organs of right-wing politics are so loud and so vociferous, it's really hard for those people to gain purchase. But I still think as people's economic interests become more tied to the energy transition, that is going to begin to change—it's just a matter of how fast it changes.

Gideon Lichfield: One of the central characters in the book is Kate Morris, this climate activist who is instrumental in helping part of the right accept the green agenda. How important is it, do you think, to have this figurehead for the climate movement? Other than Greta Thunberg there isn't really that kind of figure at the moment. Do you think we need someone like that in order to push the climate fight forward?

Stephen Markley: I've long seen those signs. There's a former congressman named Bob Inglis who I think deserves way more credit than he ever gets for being a sort of tireless advocate for climate. He lost in the Tea Party wave back in 2010 and got absolutely hammered because he was like, “Yeah, I believe the science, and I think we should do something about this crisis.” After he was voted out, he spent his entire life basically talking to all the people the climate movement would never talk to. Going on conservative talk shows, going on the radio, just sort of endlessly humping that Sisyphean boulder up the hill. And I do think—and I get these emails and comments from people—that there are more, especially young Republicans and young conservatives who don't have their heads buried in the sand on this, but they also operate within an ecosystem where the mouthpieces and the organs of right-wing politics are so loud and so vociferous, it's really hard for those people to gain purchase. But I still think as people's economic interests become more tied to the energy transition, that is going to begin to change—it's just a matter of how fast it changes.

Gideon Lichfield: One of the central characters in the book is Kate Morris, this climate activist who is instrumental in helping part of the right accept the green agenda. How important is it, do you think, to have this figurehead for the climate movement? Other than Greta Thunberg there isn't really that kind of figure at the moment. Do you think we need someone like that in order to push the climate fight forward?

FROM PALE BLUE DOT TO BIZARRE BLUE DROP

 Some centuries ago a planetary scientist by the name of Newton took time off from calculating orbits and wrote an optics primer with a chapter on why some things are highly refractive and others not. As the most refractive liquids at his disposal, olive and clove oil, could be burnt to soot, he correctly surmised that the most refractive solid he knew of might be carbonaceous too, and called diamond : "an unctuous substance much coagulated." 

While CO2 gets all the advertising these days it's important to recall that gases in general are refractive too, so planetary optics vary a lot.  Carl Sagan deserves credit for discovering that Mars thin ring of atmosphere can concentrate starlight onto a caustic curve at a focal length sometimes approximating the red planet's distance from the Earth, turning its atmosphere into a telescope of sorts. 

WEBB WAS IN FOCUS, TITAN'S ATMOSPHERE NOT SO MUCH, AND THE OIL SPILL ON THAT EARTHRISE IS ACTUALLY THE MOON'S SHADOW

The Webb Telescope made a name for itself by finding dozens of galaxies that act as gravity lenses that focus dim and distant objects into brighter Einstein Rings. Now it has turned its golden eye towards Saturn, and what may be the solar system's most refractive satellite atmosphere. The cold, dense, hydrocarbon saturated nitrogen surrounding Titan gives it a climate akin to the head space of a LNG tank. The temperature & pressure are close to the triple point of methane and ethane rain falls into hydrocarbon lakes and seas. In this atmosphere the velocity of light is anything but c . The refraction and color dispersion  of the 5% methane atmosphere  may warp wide angle views from orbit like a downmarket steampunk camera lens . Stargazing on Titan may be problematic or  headache inducing, as the stars ,inconstant in their courses,  may  part company as they approach the lens-like horizon, and the sun may rise as a blur. There's no mistaking this  bizarre blue drop for a pale blue dot.

Webb has imaged this truly alien sky in the nick of time: this pale blue dot's Voyager image shrunk below the one pixel mark years ago- nothing to see here folks, just move along: It's complicated:

But be of good courage Earthlings!  Things are looking better than ever to optics closer to home, be it a comet on the horns of the eclipsed sun:

Or Japan's 4K UHD reprise of  Apollo's Earthrise  featuring the Moon's transitory shadow: 

COMNG SOON FROM SPRINGER PUBLISHING & THE AAAS: GLUTEN FREE NATURE AND CERTIFED VEGAN SCIENCE

A  group of researchers wants a ‘nutrition label ’on papers giving the journal's acceptance rate, the number of reviewers  who read each paper, and their authors competing interests  “We want to help readers, including researchers, the media and the public, to decide whether an article is worth reporting on or citing,”  says its founder, educator  John Willinsky.

THERE ARE NO REFERENCES TO FLOOD INSURANCE IN THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

 

LOST WORLD FOUNDATION ENDORSES BIDEN CLIMATE EMERGENCY DECLARATION

Bloomberg Green

Climate Politics

White House Renews Internal Talks

 on Invoking Climate Emergency

• Youth activists push Biden for move ahead of November election
• Emergency proclamation could be used to halt exports, drilling
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SOIL CARBON UNDERESTIMATED BY >2 TRILLION TONNES

PALE CARBONATES UNDER DARK SOILS

Since agriculture & pastoralism began, human activity has altered   half the land area of the Earth. Besides visible landform and albedo changes, this disturbance has increased rates of soil alteration.  A report in Science reassesses how much inorganic carbon is vulnerable to such changes and how this impacts the global carbon cycle. 

Size, distribution, and vulnerability of the global soil inorganic carbon

YUANYUAN HUANG , XIAODONG SONG, YING-PING WANG, JOSEP G. CANADELL, YIQI LUO, PHILIPPE CIAIS, ANPING CHEN, SONGBAI HONG, YUGANG WANG, [...], AND GAN-LIN ZHANG +17 authorsAuthors Info & Affiliations

SCISCIENCE

11 Apr 2024

Vol 384, Issue 6692

pp. 233-239

DOI: 10.1126/science.adi7918

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Abstract

Global estimates of the size, distribution, and vulnerability of soil inorganic carbon (SIC) remain largely unquantified. By compiling 223,593 field-based measurements and developing machine-learning models, we report that global soils store 2305 ± 636 (±1 SD) billion tonnes of carbon as SIC over the top 2-meter depth. Under future scenarios, soil acidification associated with nitrogen additions to terrestrial ecosystems will reduce global SIC (0.3 meters) up to 23 billion tonnes of carbon over the next 30 years, with India and China being the most affected. Our synthesis of present-day land-water carbon inventories and inland-water carbonate chemistry reveals that at least 1.13 ± 0.33 billion tonnes of inorganic carbon is lost to inland-waters through soils annually, resulting in large but overlooked impacts on atmospheric and hydrospheric carbon dynamics.

TRUTH SOCIAL AI CONDEMNS AI HOCKEY STICK AS CHINESE HOAX

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ 

 Back in 2018, Dario Amodei... wondered: What would happen as you fed an artificial intelligence more and more data? He and his colleagues decided to study it, and they found that the A.I. didn’t just get better with more data; it got better exponentially. The curve of the A.I.’s capabilities rose slowly at first and then shot up like a hockey stick.

 [You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” 

Amodei is now the chief executive of his own A.I. company, Anthropic, which recently released Claude 3 — considered by many to be the strongest A.I. model available. And he still believes A.I. is on an exponential growth curve, following principles known as scaling laws. And he thinks we’re on the steep part of the climb right now. 

When I’ve talked to people who are building A.I., scenarios that feel like far-off science fiction end up on the horizon of about the next two years. So I asked Amodei on the show to share what he sees in the near future. What breakthroughs are around the corner? What worries him the most? And how are societies that struggle to adapt to change and governments that are slow to react to them supposed to prepare for the pace of change he predicts? ... This episode contains strong language.

WILL MIKE TURN MARK'S MONEY INTO A FERRARI?

READ IT HERE

THE EMBRYONIC AFFECT OF THE MATRIX OF EXHAUSTION

THE EXHAUSTED OF THE EARTH

Politics in a burning world      by Ajay Singh Chaudhary

“Here we might begin to think through palpable pressure and embryonic affect, of the inchoate affects of socioecological climate, of the novel affects attributed to climate directly, but also much more broadly of the affective matrix of exhaustion”-

REVIEW IN : Spectre,(  "a new Marxist journal... recovering the insights of Black radical thought, anti-colonial movements, socialist feminism, and queer theory for our politics...Whether an “academy of apparitions,” a “congress” of ghostly comrades, or the more feminist “racket of banshees” (or a pun-free socialist reading group) is more suitable to your local haunts, Spectre wants to hear from you and help coordinate efforts".)

It is now a cliché in some circles to say that all politics is climate politics. Yet it is also common to not take this seriously. The ways in which climate change is affecting society are not always easy to recognize, and left politics often fails to seriously integrate the climate dimension. Moreover, Marxist attempts to directly address climate change and other aspects of the ecological crisis are often insular. 

As Ajay Singh Chaudhary observes in The Exhausted of the Earth, “Marxological debates – incredibly prolific in eco-Marxist literature – aren’t particularly germane to climate politics.” Chaudhary’s book, intended as a corrective to those trends, offers much that is helpful for thinking about the politics of climate change.

 

The Exhausted of the Earth situates its arguments against the threat of right-wing climate realism—understood as “a political-ecological scenario of the concentration, preservation, and enhancement of political and economic power.” Such a scenario, Chaudhary argues, “is not only plausible and possible, but probable.” Today, right-wing responses to climate change often don’t involve outright denial; they simply aim for “maximal extraction for maximal maintenance or cash out that much better.”

 

TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE POLAR VORTEX

Explorers do the strangest things.

In 1930, encouraged by William Randolph Hearst, the Prince of Wales and Jules Verne's grandson, an Australian kangaroo hunter embarked in a World War I surplus submarine on a voyage beneath the ice to the North Pole, taking along a gravimeter, oceanographic sampling gear and a weather station. 

He stopped 600 miles short, but came back with the first measurements of the oblateness of the Earth, having discovered the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation along the way:

RISING CO2 BLAMED ON ECLIPSE PHOTOSYNTHESIS PAUSE

Lest confusion go to waste, The CO2 Coalition & the Cornwall Alliance have joined in a cunning plan to curb warming by re-siting weather station thermometers in the band of coolth traveling down the shadow of the moon during tomorrow's total eclipse of the sun.

Professor willie soon's   lunar steam eclipse
control knob detector

Besides demonstrating that sun-driven photosynthesis, not fossil carbon burning, is the God-given control knob that modulates Earth's ever changing weather, totality will bring CO2 absorption  by plants to an abrupt halt, and the ten degree chill of the moon's shade should erase America's positive average temperature anomaly in the new set of weather stations being specified for Plan 2025 by Trump shadow cabinet Secretary Willard Watts, thus restoring the Pause to its rightful place in the annals of climate cliche'.

A spokesman for Cornwall affiliate SonLife Broadcasting said the plan was theologically sound, and put paid to the conspiratorial CAGW "global warming" claptrap of the elitist MSM exactly as Reverend Swaggart's ministry had preached before:

"The Earth's temperature is not subject to the activities on the surface of the globe. In other words, humans can do nothing to make Earth cooler or warmer. Global temperatures do fluctuate up and down but such changes are totally within God's hands and mere mortals can do nothing to effect Earth's temperature one way or the other.

The first four words in the Bible are "In The Beginning God." So what God did in the beginning, He will continue to do according to His good pleasure. God created Earth for the benefit of humans. He placed animal life and plant life here for our sustenance and comfort. He designed humans and animals to breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Conversely, plant life breathes in carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen. 

This is God's master plan and nothing Al Gore and his kind do can change it one iota. Divine simpatico.  

The notion of selling or rationing carbon units is straight out of a con man's "a sucker is born every minute" play book. In other words, selling carbon units is nothing but a massive carnival hoax! 

Those who traffic in such drivel should be discredited and turned over to the justice system as soon as we get a real Attorney General"

Congregations of skeptics from Burlington to Buffalo & Cleveland to Carbondale hope to meet tomorrow to celebrate a monumental fall in the Ocean Heat Content of Lake Erie, sudden tepidity in the once Hot Springs of Arkansas, and a Pause in border crossings as climate refugees stop short at the frigid waters of the once sauna-like Rio Grande.

CLIMATE OF AWE

All the emphasis on eye safety  has left many in the path of tomorrow's event  in the dark about the finer points of eclipse viewing.

Here’s what watching two total eclipses has taught my eyes:

1. The better you are dark adapted, the more you will see!

You only get minutes of eclipse viewing in a lifetime, and you risk a dim view if you dazzle your eyes  beforehand. 

2. Get to the center of the path of totality  Every mile matters!

At the edge of the path of totality, the eclipse lasts just seconds and the horizon stays bright. But at its center, the moon's shadow extends beyond the horizon, and midnight reigns at midday for three solid minutes. As with the Milky Way, the darker the sky, the more awesome the sight of the corona.

The good news is that while we can't dark adapt in three minutes flat, we can do something past eclipse watchers never imagined

Cardboard 'eclipse glasses' leak a lot of glare, but the problem is avoidable. Why bedazzle your eyes staring at the midday sky when a live telescopic view of the shrinking sun is a google away

        on your cell phone 

This is where the art comes in. The sun's baleful surface is a million times brighter  than its million-mile-wide corona. Watch a sunset, and the long twilight automatically allows your night vision  to develop fully. Totality is not twilight. the sky goes black in the opposite of a flash! The darker the sky the bigger and brighter the corona, so get away from city lights !

Oppenheimer- style bomb-watching goggles are cool, but hard to find. Take even five minutes to dark adapt both eyes with a sleep mask, or one with a piratical black eye patch or cardboard monocle, your patience will be rewarded.   

You won't miss much, as you can see the whole run-up in reverse as the sun emerges from behind the moon- it’s the same movie played backwards.

The main event remains the solar corona, and dark adaption is the key to seeing it in all its glory. My first total eclipse, at the calm end of the eleven-year solar activity cycle featured  a few red prominences framed by a handsbreath of glowing corona. 

The next, close to peak solar activity like this one, was jaw-droppingly  different-- a wild mane of corona three moons wide stood out against a sky dark green as a Giotto fresco.

While PBS News Hour has been running eye safety warnings 24/7, it has missed a monumental teaching moment by neglecting to mention that line of  bright things that millions are about to see lined up on both sides of the black sun.

 It's the solar system. An eclipse is the only time you can see the whole damn thing at once. 

Epilog:  

Modern UHD cameras image the corona's extent and color  far better than the naked eye. Yet no TV channel, NASA's included, took advantage of that exquisite sensitivity by stationing cameras under  rural skies dark enough to reveal the Milky Way as a backdrop to the sun's corona.

Dark adaption didn't stand a chance. Instead we witnessed the wanton destruction of night vision by the lights of thoughtless network cameramen, and the mass flashing of selfies as the eclipse lost the battle with streetlights no one thought to turn off for the day.  

Only as the eclipse was exiting America did NBC give Houlton Maine town Councilor and amateur astronomer Mark Horvath  a chance to name the planets flanking the sun.