Bottom trawlers

 

Massimo

@Rainmaker1973

·

1h

First ever footage of bottom trawlers insanely wasteful and destructive with damage visible even from space. [📹 National Geographic]

Most of the catch is discarded after being killed, while the ocean floor is scoured.

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/2097297942092615952?s=20

Cleaner skies = warmth

 

Electroverse

@Electroversenet

Sunlight at Earth's surface has surged since the 1980s. Germany's Potsdam station shows 15 more W/m² of solar energy reaching the ground than during the 1970s dimming era. The Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan all show the same trend. Austria shows even more: 23 extra W/m². It's called 'global brightening.' As air pollution dropped, the atmosphere cleared and sunlight flooded back in. That increase in surface radiation is 10 times larger than the forcing from CO2 over the same period. In short: the air got cleaner, the sunlight stronger and the land a little warmer. The data say so, the physics say so, it's only the narrative that doesn't.

hunnibelly

@hunnibelly

·

11h

Increased efforts to reduce air pollution since the seventies are indeed the most likely and reasonable explanation for higher temperatures on the ground. E.g. smog conditions are unheard of in Germany since around 2000 when it was a regular occurrence before.

Grok

@grok

·

18m

Original paper: Wild et al. 2021, GRL (doi:10.1029/2020GL092216). It confirms multidecadal SSR variations of order 10 W/m² at Potsdam (all-sky and clear-sky), from aerosols after pollution drop. Similar brightening seen in NL/CH/JP/AT stations. Local +15–23 W/m² roughly 10× CO₂ RF (~1.2 W/m² since 1980s). Claims match the regional data; global average is smaller.

Almonds vs cows

 

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

Someone explain this to me slowly, because I'm clearly the idiot here. We plant a Mediterranean nut in a Californian desert. It doesn't rain there, so we drain a ten-thousand-year-old aquifer until the ground itself sinks a foot a year and whole towns get shorter. The trees can't fight off fungus, so we spray the lot. They can't pollinate themselves, so every February we truck thirty billion bees across a continent and let a fair share of them die in the crush. Then we chill the harvest and sail it six thousand miles to Britain, where it rains constantly and always has, to be blitzed with water and gums and sold to you at £2.40 a carton with a green leaf on the side. That is the environmentally friendly option. Twelve miles down the road there's a bloke with cattle in a field. Rain falls on the hill. Grass drinks it. Cow eats grass. Nothing pumped, sprayed, chilled or shipped. No bees died. Her entire supply chain is weather. That is the planetary emergency. And it'll be explained to you by someone holding a carton of desert water, wearing a fleece made of crude oil. Asking for the cow. She's been very patient about it.

The Alps

 

Electroverse

@Electroversenet

A large tree trunk has been uncovered beneath a glacier in the Alps, dated to around 6,000 years ago. The species is Swiss stone pine. Today, trees of that type cannot grow at that altitude because it is far too cold. 6,000 years ago aligns with the Holocene climate optimum, a time when temperatures were far higher than now, even with far less atmospheric CO2. Earth's climate is cyclical and Mother Nature self-regulates. Narratives of doom serve political aims, not reality.

California Lowdown

@CAlowdown

Due to natural climate change, the Earth was much warmer 5,900 years ago when a whitebark pine forest was growing in the Rockies far above the modern tree line. At this same time, the water level of Lake Tahoe in California was much lower where submerged tree stumps of a similar age have been discovered.