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West Coast Cherry Crops Destroyed By Heatwave

newtboy says...

And now the swarms of locusts (ok, really grasshoppers) begin.

Utah farmers, already struggling with drought and extreme heat, are being plagued by grasshoppers destroying what little crops they managed to grow. Early heat caused an early hatch, leading to swarms. Many farmers abandoned their crops rather than go through the expense of spraying a crop they have no water for, allowing a bad situation to get exponentially worse. Hay may soon be in short supply along with produce.

If it's a mild winter, expect worse next year when their eggs hatch. Without improvement in the weather, colder in winter wetter in spring and cooler in summer, farmers nationwide expect next year to be far worse than this year's disastrous growing season. Nevada and Arizona are due to lose their main water source soon, and California expects more water shortages statewide as reservoirs near empty and aquifers go dry.

Sure sounds like the climatologists were correct, if anything minimizing the effects and rate of change from climate change; heat, drought, plagues, swarms, fires. They were not exaggerating them @bobknight33. These are exactly what they predicted, just a decade early, and exactly what you denied would happen. All time high local temperatures were reached worldwide in the last month including ground temperatures of 118 F in arctic Siberia and 130 F last weekend in Death Valley, the hottest atmospheric air temperature ever seen on the planet since humans existed.

But nope, climate change is a liberal hoax, they just have the entire planet lying to support it, destroying their own crops and cooking their citizens to keep the lie going. 🤦‍♂️

I hope you live long enough for your children to accept that their disastrous future was caused by you and your ilk and abandon you to the baking streets in your old age to starve and bake. You ignorant and dishonest deniers deserve worse for decimating the only planet we have. Your children will come to that conclusion, the only question is when.

Seagull steals iPhone from beach and flies off

StukaFox says...

Y'know what? Seriously, fuck seagulls. I fucking hate seagulls. Y'know why? They're total cunts. You know why they're cunts? Because they're cunts. Seagulls are God's answer to "why do children get cancer?" God says, "Because fuck you, that's why! Here's a seagull, you asshole."
"Ohh, but they ate all the locusts and saved Salt Lake City!" people say. Fuck them, too. The only thing good that ever came outta SLC is Steve Young and he ended his career flat on his back and the Niners have sucked ever since. Except for Kap; we'll give 'em one for Kap. We totally woulda won that game if the other team hadn't been better. They can go fuck themselves, too.
Ok, check this out: I was walking on the beach near Pescadaro and eating this awesome fucking carne asada taco I got at the super-secret Mexican place in the gas station and it was fucking amazingly good. This is the kinda taco that if it was pussy, you'd marry it and not give a shit when it fucked your best friend and ran off to Vegas with all your money. Seriously, it was that good. And I'm eatin' this goddamn glorious taco and feeling like I'm on top of the world and all is right with the universe. Then a motherfucking seagull all Stuka-moves me and snatches my taco! I'm all, "DUDE!! That's hella my taco, BITCH!", but then I remembered that birds don't speak English so I was like "Fuck!"
Seriously, 'tho, that was totally a good taco and shit.
Fuck seagulls.

Mordhaus (Member Profile)

Steel Mill Workers Sling Ribbons Of Hot Steel

Jay, Maine Pulp Mill Explosion

Mordhaus (Member Profile)

A Banksy triggers empathy in passers-by towards homeless man

Twitter video embeds (Sift Talk Post)

Dear Future Generations: Sorry

Mordhaus says...

Why is there so much nuclear waste? Because we have so many people living in artificial environments that require tons of power.

Why is the Colorado river becoming almost drained and getting worse each year? Because of climate change, yes, but primarily because we have millions of people living in desert regions and agricultural crops like almonds that require laughable tons of water. Most of those almonds are turned into flour and milk products because people refuse to eat other food, or can't because they should be dead due to allergies.

Why are we overfishing and using such harmful methods as trawling? Because we have too many people that want a specific kind of food or can't afford a different type of food.

Could we switch everyone to insect proteins or other radical foods like spirulina? Yes, if you want riots. The technology doesn't exist that can make sustainable foods taste the same and people would go apeshit.

So to sum up, yes, we could feed people without damaging the environment, if you could get people to agree to it. Think of trying to force vegans to chomp on insects. As far as habitats, not so much. We don't have the room for the sheer numbers of people without either doing away with food producing land, destroying existing ecosystems like the rainforest, or putting them in artificially sustained areas like large cities or hot/cold desert terrain.

Nature used to take care of these situations via epidemics or natural selection. We have adapted to the point where we can beat most epidemics (although soon we will be hit with something bad if we look at the super bacteria we are creating) and we protect the people who should be dead against their own stupidity.

Climate change isn't going to kill this planet first, the sheer population rise will wipe it out much sooner than that. By 2030 it is estimated we will have 8+ billion people, by 2050 close to 10 billion. Exponential growth is going to suck this planet dry as a bone. The day is coming when we will HAVE to start supplementing food with non-standard food types and soon after that we will wipe out most of the living food items on this planet like a horde of locusts.

diego said:

actually, its not at all like that. the planet has food and land in surplus for everyone, but there is huge waste. Some of it is the price of technology and the modern life style, some of it is avoidable, reckless waste, but its not only a matter of "if there were only less people". That wouldnt make trawling the ocean any less destructive, or nuclear waste any less toxic. The planet is going to survive no matter what, the question is in what form, reducing the number of people on the planet only changes the time it takes to ruin the planet if the people that remain are going to continue irresponsibly consuming and contaminating as before.

Why Avocados Shouldn't Exist

Buttle says...

The story I have read is that honey locusts have thorns because North American elephants (mammoths, mastodons) were once tempted to push them over.

AnimalsForCrackers said:

Did a quick search on your first one because stuff like this interests me.

The prevailing opinion seems to be the most intuitive; the Americas also had a variety of Pleistocene cats/cheetahs (explains the speed) and dogs/hyenas (explains the seemingly uncharacteristic endurance as compared to their Old World "counterparts") which evolved alongside the nigh-extinct family ( Antilocapridae) of which pronghorns are the last living
members.

The second one, I don't know, because the plant got bored one day (as they are wont to do) and decided to spice things up?

Why Avocados Shouldn't Exist

Buttle says...

Some other evolutionary whodunits from the new world:

Why did pronghorn antelopes become the second fastest running animals in the world?

Why do honey locust trees have thorns all over their trunks?

Is Climate Change Just A Lot Of Hot Air?

newtboy says...

There MUST be a miswording there, or bold faced, outright lie.
As temperatures rise, frozen underwater methane (methyl hydrate)is melted and RELEASED, not trapped. Not only that, as the ice on land disappears, it exposes permafrost that, as it melts, also emits methane. It's been happening for a while now, and is accelerating. Methane is FAR more damaging to the atmosphere than CO2, for longer times, so once this cycle takes off, we can expect exponential increase in the temperature rise.
It's POSITIVE feedback loop, not a negative one.
EDIT: Perhaps they mean when the Atlantic currents are disrupted and the lower ocean becomes colder...at that point it will have the ability to store more methane, but not the ability to capture it from the atmosphere since the upper ocean will be far warmer.
As for your misunderstanding of CO2, removing all CO2 production tomorrow won't remove any in the atmosphere, it will be there for quite some time before it could be absorbed in the ocean/forests, and that time period extends daily as the ocean becomes more acidic (making it impossible for diatoms to use the CO2 to make their shells) and the forests are removed. Once the ocean stops absorbing CO2, even the amount naturally created will be far too much for the atmosphere, and temps/CO2 levels will still rise even if we produce absolutely none. The tipping point was in the 70s-80s when we could have stopped CO2 production and made a difference. Now, it's too late unless we find a way to trap CO2 and keep it trapped. The systems are quite slow to react.
As for people "thriving", that's just ridiculous. There's been a food shortage world wide for quite some time now. The water shortage is becoming a bigger threat, and that's expected to increase exponentially as glaciers, snow packs, and aquifers rapidly disappear. Ocean harvests have drastically decreased, as have natural foods. We are thriving in the same way locusts 'thrive' when they swarm...but note that 99.9% of them die of starvation in the end.

bcglorf said:

Wait, wait, wait

@charliem,

Please correct me if I'm wrong on this as I can't get to the full body of the article you linked for methane, but here's the concluding statement from the abstract:
We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

Now, unless there is a huge nuanced wording that I'm missing, sinks in this context are things that absorb something. A methane sink is something that absorbs methane. More over, if the sink is enhanced by warming, that means it will absorb MORE methane the warmer it gets. So it's actually the opposite of your claim and is actually a negative feedback mechanism as methane is a greenhouse gas and removing it as things warmers and releasing it as things cool is the definition of a negative feedback.

Outcome-Based Education & wHY yER & yUR chOOlDRIN aRE mORoNS

charliem says...

So what happened to testing for 1+1=? .....why the fuck do we care about internal vs external locust of control? Molding personality is NOT the role of education, thats some borderline religious bullshit there.

"Obama is bringing the apocalypse!" -Tim LaHaye on Huckabee

ulysses1904 says...

I'll say it again. People love using cliches like end times, end of days, the apocalypse, doomsday, reckoning, and it's the end of the world with the accompanying locust swarms, earthquakes, diseases, catastrophes, blah blah blah. Hollywood, the Bible and atomic weapons have turned people into excitable little drama queens. The earth will not end in some predicted scripted big bang, rather the natural forces of the universe will run their course over however many million years. "End of days", hahahahaha.

Best Albums of 2010 (Metal Talk Post)

bamdrew says...

hey, DillingerEscapePlan! I've seen them a halfdozen times. Jeez, probably ten years ago,... I'm getting soo old soo fast...

Anyhow, my musical taste kept going into weirder directions this year;

Sufjan Steven's made a tremendously interesting and personal album (Age of Adz) that took this consistently well done electronic turn, like it was produced by Reznor or something ('I Walked' is a highlight for me, with a weeeirdly cool, staggered melody that I'd never really heard done successfully before...). His vocals grow on you after a while... really the whole album gets a lot better with repeat listens (good night-driving album).

Yeasayer shared a (free) live album... I saw them twice in 2010, so might be biased, but they are just the right amount of experimental with a dash of pop so that people get down at their shows. 'Madder Red', 'Tight Rope', '2080', a lot of good stuff. Bit of an 80's throwback with the synth drums and such, but I like it as a child of the 80's.

Beach House (Teen Dream)... oooh beach house... listened to their album for all of Jan and Feb of 2010... great driving cd... love minimalism with build-ups, which is basically every song by them, and her distinct smoker's voice is just rad. Very different band doing its own thing. If you're into As I Lay Dying and all that business right now this cd might be a stretch... however I used to be way into The Locust, so, you never know! (ok, I still listen to The Locust from time to time...)

Local Natives cd was good. The ladies dug this shit a lot because of the vocal harmonies and whatnot; as a drummer, I thought it was pretty rocking at times, and had some nice minorkey guitar themes and buildups. Also caught them live, and they were excellent. 'Wide Eyes' is a good one.

Lastly, she didn't put out a cd, but I listened to a lot of Neko Case in 2010. 'Star Witness', 'The Pharaohs', 'Blacklisted','Deep Red Bells', 'Things that Scare Me',... all these darker, noir tracks really work for me, and I don't think anybody else is doing anything like this successfully. Plus Neko has the greatest voice possible.

Thanks for sharing your top 10; I'll check 'em out!



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