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Cake day: February 25th, 2024

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  • These proposed cuts to NASA science are significantly harming not only the national security interests of the United States, but also the lives, safety, and resilience of citizens across the country and globe. While NASA’s astrophysics and planetary science divisions monitor and explore worlds and the Universe beyond our own, including potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, it’s NASA’s Earth science and heliophysics divisions that teach us things that directly impact our planet.

    NASA’s Earth observing satellites and stations are key to monitoring climate, water resources, natural disasters and their impacts, air pollution, wildfires, droughts, and key infrastructure components all across the world. Satellite instruments monitor stores of groundwater, and can identify weather events even as they’re still forming over the oceans.





  • People don’t get excited to vote against candidates/platforms nearly as much as they do to vote for them. The choices may not be equally bad but that’s surprisingly irrelevant. South Park’s Turd Sandwich is pretty spot on.

    But to your point, most of them didn’t vote for the climate change apocalypse, they voted for the racism.

    Some of them undoubtedly did vote for the apocalypse, because their religious views include hastening the end so they can get to the rapture. That’s terrifying and underreported, but I suspect it’s a minority. There’s nothing Great Again about destroying the world, unless you’re a rapacious billionaire who wants to sit on a larger stack of toys in your cool bunker. Most of the idiots won’t realize how they got swindled until it’s far too late.



  • “What that means is that you can probably keep growing timber and and hold lots of carbon at the same time,” Schwarzmann said.  “If you’re having (forestland) devoted just for carbon storage, you’re more likely to have even larger carbon sequestration levels on some of these forests.”

    He said the findings could be used to re-evaluate timber harvest of older forests, noting logging could still occur while leaving a higher number of trees on the landscape to store carbon.

    Forests are part of the carbon cycle, not effective long-term storage. It’s an easy mistake to make, thinking that since wood is made from carbon, growing trees should help remove carbon from the atmosphere. Trees can live for hundreds of years, which sounds like a long time to humans, but it’s not. Trees die and their carbon mostly returns to the atmosphere as they decompose or burn in a fire. Living trees are best represent a temporary carbon buffer, not sequestration.

    Humans have been bringing sequestered carbon out of retirement - oil represents plants and animals that lived millions of years ago, that got trapped deep underground mostly by happenstance. To effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere, we must take the built up material and store it deep below the earth’s surface. I don’t think burying trees in a big pit will ever become especially popular.