Day: December 27, 2017

cardozzza:

lohver:

do you ever wonder how many strangers hate you because of how someone else described you to them

So I met this girl and we really hit it off. She was so funny, so sweet, so kind. And just had a real gentle way about her. We quickly became friends. A week later, the guy I was dating found out and was furious. Apparently this was his Evil Bitch Ex he had told me allll about.

I was shocked. This sweet wonderful girl didn’t match at all the picture of the Evil Bitch Ex he had described. Turned out, what made her an evil bitch was that she finally got tired of being walked all over and left him. She wasn’t hateful, cruel, selfish, anything like that.

Sometimes I wonder if I am the new Evil Bitch Ex, and I’m so glad I got away lol.

scarhaver:

theres a weird fixation both america and britain have on the working class of the opposite nation and how ignorant or folksy or ‘cute’ or dangerous they are which if you think about it is really fucking obnoxious and oh my god shut up

pervocracy:

thatonemushroom:

pervocracy:

Let’s get something clear here.

Men sitting with knees three feet apart on crowded public transportation, in a full auditorium, or somewhere else that other people might need to sit next to them = manspreading

Men sitting with knees three feet apart in a 90% empty bus, a chair not connected to other seats, or any other setting where they’re not encroaching on others’ seating options or personal space = whatever, people can sit how they like

What about when a woman does it? Do we use a term like “womanspreading” to imply it’s a function of their womanhood or should we maybe not pick up every term feminists invent when they’re annoyed?

Women don’t do it as often, because:

1. They’re more likely to be pressured to cede space rather than proudly take it up

2. They’re taught that sitting with your knees apart is immodest/crude

and

3. They’re less likely to want to communicate “my genitals are thiiiiis big”

And just observationally, I have seen a lot more men than women sitting on subway cars with their butts taking up one seat and their knees taking up two more, while people either squeeze uncomfortably next to them or stand in the aisle to avoid dealing with them.

I don’t think that this is, like, the feminist issue of the century, but I do stand by believing that it’s an annoying thing and it is generally a male/masculine annoying thing.

The Dirty Secret of the Global Plan to Avert Climate Disaster

thedevitoanditsown:

comcastkills:

thedevitoanditsown:

thedevitoanditsown:

In the report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—universally known by yet another acronym, IPCC—presented results from hundreds of computer-model-generated scenarios in which the planet’s temperature rises less than 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, the limit eventually set by the Paris Climate Agreement.

The 2°C goal was a theoretical limit for how much warming humans could accept. For leading climatologist James Hansen, even the 2°C limit is unsafe. And without emissions cuts, global temperatures are projected to rise by 4°C by the end of the century. Many scientists are reluctant to make predictions, but the apocalyptic litany of what a 4°C world could hold includes widespread drought, famine, climate refugees by the millions, civilization-threatening warfare, and a sea level rise that would permanently drown much of New York, Miami, Mumbai, Shanghai, and other coastal cities.

But here’s where things get weird. The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”

Indeed, following the scenarios’ assumptions, just growing the crops needed to fuel those BECCS plants would require a landmass one to two times the size of India, climate researchers Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters wrote. The energy BECCS was supposed to supply is on par with all of the coal-fired power plants in the world. In other words, the models were calling for an energy revolution—one that was somehow supposed to occur well within millennials’ lifetimes.

Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?

In 2007 IMAGE published an influential paper relying on BECCS in Climatic Change, and garnered much attention at an IPCC expert meeting. Other groups started putting BECCS into their models too, which is how it came to dominate those included in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (the one that prompted the BBC to call Karlsson).

The models assumed BECCS on a vast scale. According to an analysis that British climate researcher Jason Lowe shared with Carbon Brief, at median the models called for BECCS to remove 630 gigatons of CO2, roughly two-thirds of the carbon dioxide humans have emitted between preindustrial times and 2011. Was that reasonable?

Not for James Hansen, who wrote that reliance on negative emissions had quietly “spread like a cancer” through the scenarios, along with the assumption that young people would somehow figure out how to extract CO2 at a cost he later projected to be $140–570 trillion this century.

Anderson (of the India calculations) pointed out that the few 2°C scenarios without BECCS required CO2 emissions to peak back in 2010—something, he noted wryly, that “clearly has not occurred.” In a scathing letter in 2015, Anderson accused scientists of using negative emissions to sanitize their research for policymakers, calling them a “deux ex machina.” Fellow critics argued that the integrated assessment models had become a political device to make the 2°C goal seem more plausible than it was.

Oliver Geden, who heads the EU division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, raised the alarm in the popular press. In a New York Times op-ed during the conference, he called negative emissions “magical thinking”—a concept, he says, meant to keep the “story” of 2°C, the longtime goal of international climate negotiations, alive.

You can’t trust the UN to solve anything. They’re always gonna try and make themselves look better by manipulating facts.

I mean I guess that’s “manipulating facts”, if anything it shows me how utterly screwed we are when it comes to global warming. I don’t think the UN is trying to make themselves look better, they’re managing an unavoidable crisis the way technocrats always do, through deception and false hope.

The Dirty Secret of the Global Plan to Avert Climate Disaster