"For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3 percent of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3 percent for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level."

"It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4 percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus projected.

Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people."

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/29/william-nordhaus-climate-economics/

- Production of Fossil Fuel Far Outpaces Global Goals: In 2030, if current projections hold, the United States will drill for more oil and gas than at any point in its history. Russia and Saudi Arabia plan to do the same. They’re among the world’s fossil fuel giants that, together, are on course this decade to produce twice the amount of fossil fuels than a critical global warming threshold allows, according to a United Nations-backed report issued on Wednesday. The report, which looked at 20 major fossil fuel producing countries, underscores the wide gap between world leaders’ lofty promises to take stronger action on climate change and their nations’ actual production plans
- Wind power projects are running into trouble
- The U.K.’s Conservative government is ditching climate commitments and pretending oil and gas are fine
- Clean energy stocks are suffering while the fossil fuel industry is thriving, because destroying the planet remains (for now) extremely profitable. The Times tells us:

[T]he shares of a broad range of clean energy companies have been crushed lately, in a rout that encompasses just about every alternative energy sector, including solar, wind and geothermal power. At the same time, rather than weaning themselves off oil, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the two biggest U.S. oil companies, are doubling down. They have announced acquisitions that will vastly increase their oil reserves. Exxon intends to buy Pioneer Natural Resources, a major shale drilling company, for $59.5 billion. Chevron plans a $53 billion purchase of Hess, a big integrated oil company. These are enormous bets on oil for years to come.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/the-climate-crisis-is-slipping-from-the-news-right-when-it-needs-our-attention-most/

1700 books on Palestine

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18u9KYo3MvRpyI0SDqD2AzseTvuSn3S8T

"Another thing to be optimistic about (although time will tell if it actually catches on) is federation—a more decentralized version of social networking. Federated networks like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads are all just Twitter clones on their surface—a feed of short text posts—but they’re also all designed to offer various forms of interoperability. Basically, where your current social media account and data exist in a walled garden controlled entirely by one company, you could be on Threads and follow posts from someone you like on Mastodon—or at least Meta says that’s coming. (Many—including internet pioneer Richard Stallman, who has a page on his personal website devoted to “Why you should not be used by Threads”—have expressed skepticism of Meta’s intentions and promises.) Even better, it enables more granular moderation. Again, X (the website formerly known as Twitter) provides a good example of what can go wrong when one person, in this case Elon Musk, has too much power in making moderation decisions—something federated networks and the so-called “fediverse” could solve.

The big idea is that in a future where social media is more decentralized, users will be able to easily switch networks without losing their content and followings. “As an individual, if you see [hate speech], you can just leave, and you’re not leaving your entire community—your entire online life—behind. You can just move to another server and migrate all your contacts, and it should be okay,” says Paige Collings, a senior speech and privacy advocate at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And I think that’s probably where we have a lot of opportunity to get it right.”"

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/

The right paved the way for these once-unthinkable bans by first pursuing goals that were more palatable to the public, using bathroom bills and school sports bans to normalise hateful anti-trans rhetoric in the American public sphere. This tactic has been effective.

The logical next step is to begin to restrict adult access to gender-affirming care, while pretending you’re not pursuing outright bans that would likely be ruled unconstitutional.

This requires borrowing a page from the anti-abortion legislative playbook, where so-called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws became common in the early 21st century. State governments passed unnecessary building codes in ways that would cause abortion clinics to be in violation, or required abortion providers to have ‘admitting privileges’, meaning a person affiliated to an abortion clinic must have the right to admit patients to a hospital.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/republican-states-gender-affirming-care-adults-bans-tactics/