Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont all experienced their warmest Januaries ever. After a short burst of extreme cold early this month, the mild temperatures returned.
New England is warming faster than nearly every other part of the country, and the region’s winters are warming twice as quickly as the other seasons, said Stephen Young, a professor of sustainability and geography at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Any activity that relies on the cold, whether skiing or making maple syrup, is looking at an unstable future.
It's a crime this band never made it.
Just got my external Bose speaker working again. Nice.
"The richest 1 percent of people on Earth made almost two-thirds of the new wealth created since the pandemic began, Oxfam said in a report released Monday, the opening day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, a ski resort in the Swiss Alps." (WaPo, a while ago)
Humans have the largest ratio of brain mass-to-body mass of any mammals, but of all species ants have the largest ratio at about 15% (NdT)
(Ants are insects, not mammals.)
Anyway why is it the ratio that matters? If the brain is basically a computer, why isn't its size (proportional to the number of neurons and synapses?) the relevant metric, and not its relative size to body mass?
The Japanese Meteorological Association has measured 2022 to be the 6th-warmest year since 1890.
I also heard on YouTube Shorts that all mammals take 21 seconds to empty their bladder, regardless of their mass and size. (Can't find the link, sorry.) My own investigations have varied somewhat, but I'm no longer at the optimum human age.
Sea-ice extent in the Arctic was 3rd-lowest for Januarys, starting in 1979.
For the Antarctic it was the lowest ever for Januarys.
But the Antarctic SIE continues to be...weird...inscrutable...confusing...intriguing. Here's its 12-month moving average:
The data are here -- choose #2.
I came across this chart of the locations of suicide jumps on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, from Wikipedia:
Of course I don't know why, and can only speculate. I would guess that view to the east, the side of the bridge from which the vast majority of jumpers jump, is more "friendly" -- in the direction of people, of humanity, of life. The view to the west is pretty rough, just impersonal ocean, waves and current going out rapidly.
Why would jumpers prefer to jump towards civilization instead of into a relative abyss? Of course, I don't know that either. Maybe it's some bare, atavistic impulse to still want to be involved in life, even as it ends.
I remember the story, when I lived in New Hampshire, of a man with a terminal illness. He had always loved hiking in the NH mountains, of which the White Mountains are the most prominent and spectacular. To die he choose to climb to the top of one of them, in a colder time of the year, and sit there until he froze to death.
Dying alone, that's got to be a tough choice. Hardly typical. Except suicide is always a lonely choice. But maybe, just perhaps, brave in a way. I wonder if jumping to the west of the Golden Gate Bridge isn't somehow equivalent, when jumping to the east might be a last, if fatal, sign of hope. These things are very deep and I don't know if we can ever understand them. I don't really need to. But the Wiki chart made me think and wonder.
--
Added: the Golden Gate Bridge now has suicide nets, since 2013:
Items I found interesting:
"This is what happens when a political party, year after year, systematically destroys the norms and institutions of democracy. This is what happens when those expert at tearing things down are put in charge of governing. The dysfunction has been building over years of government shutdowns, debt-default showdowns and other fabricated crises, and now anti-government Republicans have used their new majority to bring the House itself to a halt.
"This is insurrection by other means: Two years to the day since the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, Republicans are still attacking the functioning of government. McCarthy opened the door to the chaos by excusing Donald Trump’s fomenting of the attack and welcoming a new class of election deniers to his caucus. Now he’s trying to save his own political ambitions by agreeing to institutionalize the chaos — not just for the next two years but for future congresses as well." (Washington Post)
"This ordinary violence has always riddled the sport and it affects all players. But Black players are disproportionately affected. While Black men are severely underrepresented in positions of power across football organizations, such as coaching and management, they are overrepresented on the gridiron. Non-white players account for 70 percent of the NFL; nearly half of all Division I college football players are Black. Further, through a process called racial stacking, coaches racially segregate athletes by playing position. These demographic discrepancies place Black athletes at a higher risk during play."
The Hadley Central England Temperature (HadCET) set a record high in 2022.
The record -- the longest instrumental record in the world -- consists of monthly temperatures (absolute) since the year 1659 -- though the data for 1659 - Oct 1722 are much less accurate. If you ignore that period, it's still the warmest in 300 years! 2022's annual average was 11.1°C (52.0°F).
"The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole! We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in store for us — sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason."-- Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World
And Then There's Physics reports that Victor Venema had died.
That's sad and a loss for the climate community, and decency in general. Victor was a scientist at the University of Bonn who worked on the homogenization of climate data*, and very active on social media. I corresponded with him several times, asking question about temperature data. He was always kind and thoughtful and pleasant. I'm sorry to hear he has passed.
....in global grain production per capita. Almost looks permanent.
On the other hand, here ChatGPT makes an egregious arithmetic error. Surprising. And scary. Makes it impossible to believe any nonobvious conclusion it comes up with....
