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.

Farmers in the Netherlands

 

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

The Netherlands is the size of Wales. It is also the second-largest agricultural exporter on the planet by value, shifting roughly €100 billion of food a year out of a country you can drive across in an afternoon. The system that built this has been running, refining itself, since the 1950s, and feeding most of northern Europe in the process. It is also the diet that built the Dutch themselves. In 1850, the average Dutchman was 5 foot 5, among the shortest in Europe. Today he stands 6 foot, the tallest in the world. The variable, by every cross-country analysis ever run on the question, was dairy. Cheese, butter, milk, repeated every day, for six generations, on a national scale. The Netherlands grew its population upward by feeding them what the soil and the cow could produce together. In 2019, a Dutch court ruled that the country's nitrogen emissions, principally ammonia from livestock manure, exceeded EU limits. In 2022, the government published a target: halve nitrogen emissions by 2030. According to its own modelling, this required closing roughly 11,200 farms and significantly reducing livestock numbers on a further 17,600. €25 billion was allocated to buy farmers out. Voluntary first. Then forced, if the voluntary route did not deliver. Nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal informed the country, in public, that there was no better offer coming. The farmers responded by driving tractors onto motorways, blocking distribution centres, and inverting the Dutch flag. Forty thousand of them gathered in central Netherlands in a single day. The police were briefly issued with shovels because the tear gas was running low and the farmers had brought slurry. The protest did not stop the policy. The BBB party, formed by farmers in response, briefly became the largest force in the Dutch Senate, the coalition government softened some elements, and the rest continued. The Dutch dairy farmer who built his herd in 1985 is, in 2026, either gone, going, or being offered 120% of his land's value to leave. He is being offered this because the cow that built the tallest population on Earth is, by spreadsheet, now the problem. Meanwhile, in the same country, Schiphol airport, KLM, and the Dutch chemical industry collectively emit nitrogen oxides the dairy sector cannot match, and have been treated with significantly more diplomatic care. The farmer is the easiest fight because the farmer is one man, on one piece of ground, with one tractor. The chemical plant is owned by a board. Boards do not get bought out at 120%. They get consulted.

Sun-driven climate

 

Electroverse

@Electroversenet

Astrophysicist Dr Willie Soon says the climate is driven overwhelmingly by the sun, not by human carbon dioxide. He notes the sun supplies 99.99% of Earth's energy and its output fluctuates matching temperature shifts far better than CO2 trends. Soon argues the CO2 signal is below detection as a primary driver and that past climate swings like the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age line up with solar variability, not emissions. Dr Soon calls the obsession with carbon dioxide political. You can tax CO2 but you can't tax the sun. He describes an "iron triangle" of government funding, compliant science and media amplification that turns uncertainty into dogma. Soon's message is simple: The climate system is solar driven, the CO2 narrative is wildly overstated and the real priority should be adaptation and affordable energy, not pretending we can regulate the sun.

Richard 

@HopeEdwardes

·

May 13

More electrogarbage - solar output fluctuations are specifically addressed in the IPCC’s Global Assessment Reports and do not explain climate change - this has been independently confirmed by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Group

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