Rime posted:

A joint research team at the Division of Biotechnology, DGIST, confirmed that microplastics(MPs) ingested orally accumulate in the brain and act as neurotoxic substances.

Microglial phagocytosis of polystyrene microplastics results in immune alteration and apoptosis in vitro and in vivo





I mean, OP from this morning is probably correct that Atmospheric Rivers won't be the cause of our demise in the west. Just as likely loving absurdly incorrect that the mountain of poo poo we've created isn't rapidly coming back to bite us in the rear end, tho. HTH, behold the Great Leveler.

We know Microplastics weakening the adhesive abilities of muscles.
We know they are impairing the cognitive ability of hermit crabs
We know they are causing aneurysms and reproductive changes in fish via disruption to the endocrine & hormone systems.
We know they can alter the shape of human lung cells.

Now we know they are going straight to the brain less than a week after ingestion and inducing immediate broad-spectrum neurotoxic effects.

We ingest an estimated 52,000 microplastic particles a year, depending on lifestyle.

Kick back, pop on that tune, and take a moment to consider the ramifications of this.

Deep Dish Fuckfest posted:

plastics have existed for a while so i'm pretty sure if they led to brain problems we'd all have turned stupid by now

anyhow man am i glad society is mobilizing all of its resources to fight this climate change thing

Rime posted:

Xaris posted:

lead has existed for awhile and if leaded gasoline was all that bad we'd know.

Xaris posted:

also there's lag time and general uninterest in examing (or funding) anything until long after.


also there's lag time between breakdown and dispersal

surely the massive rise in obesity across humans + animals across all diets (captive or wild), plummeting male and female fertility (not associated with birth control/'education'), shrinking penis sizes, alarmingly falling average years of puberty on-set (down from 12-13 in 1980 to 10-11), massive rise in autism and neurological problems, early onset dementias, and prob a bunch of other stuff is unrelated

Rime posted:

A joint research team at the Division of Biotechnology, DGIST, confirmed that microplastics(MPs) ingested orally accumulate in the brain and act as neurotoxic substances.

Horizon Burning posted:

the autism one is the one that always gets me because people tend to say things like 'oh, we're just better at detecting it these days' but it's so absurdly not the case if you work in education. there was this school i worked at where, a few decades ago, they had a sheet of exactly four kids posted in the staff room for the kids who have severe issues like autism etc. nowadays, there's like 3-4 in every year level if not more. teachers are increasingly trained to handle kids with issues like that and it's not an 'if you ever...' measure but a 'you will need this' measure. i feel like the idea that just better detection is accounting for the increasing prevalence is just cope.

as apocalyptic as climate change is, i feel like microplastic stuff is way worse.

Popoto posted:

wow three “1 in 100 years storms” hitting Canada in a week. what are the odds huh?

Rime posted:

A joint research team at the Division of Biotechnology, DGIST, confirmed that microplastics(MPs) ingested orally accumulate in the brain and act as neurotoxic substances.

Microglial phagocytosis of polystyrene microplastics results in immune alteration and apoptosis in vitro and in vivo





I mean, OP from this morning is probably correct that Atmospheric Rivers won't be the cause of our demise in the west. Just as likely loving absurdly incorrect that the mountain of poo poo we've created isn't rapidly coming back to bite us in the rear end, tho. HTH, behold the Great Leveler.

We know Microplastics weakening the adhesive abilities of muscles.
We know they are impairing the cognitive ability of hermit crabs
We know they are causing aneurysms and reproductive changes in fish via disruption to the endocrine & hormone systems.
We know they can alter the shape of human lung cells.

Now we know they are going straight to the brain less than a week after ingestion and inducing immediate broad-spectrum neurotoxic effects.

We ingest an estimated 52,000 microplastic particles a year, depending on lifestyle.

Kick back, pop on that tune, and take a moment to consider the ramifications of this.

Rime posted:

I wake up and stretch, in a bed filled with plastic fibers.

Get up, my feet touch a carpeted floor, made of plastic fibers.

Open the curtains, made of spun plastic fibers.

Put on some clothes, made of plastic fibers.

The water (filled with microplastics at the source) in my tap travels through kilometers of plastic piping and tubing. I brush my teeth with plastic fibers on a plastic handle.

Make some coffee / tea in a plastic kettle, mix in some honey from a plastic container.

Pour my breakfast oats out of a plastic bag.

Throw my lunch in a plastic container, into my backpack made of plastic, head out the door. Keycard is plastic, I've lost a couple.

Hop into my truck, cab decked out in plastic, turn on the cabin heater full blast.

Head off to work.

Grind a few dozen lbs of short-chain polymer resin into the air and watch it blow away on the breeze, smiling at a job well done.

Get "home", cook some dinner out of plastic packaging.

Chill out on my couch made of plastic.

Repeat the first few steps in reverse, settling down into my semi-plastic bed for a peaceful 8 hours of slumber.

Can't wait to see what tomorrow brings! Another beautiful day on this glorious planet we call home, I'm sure. Glad I focus on living a clean healthy life!

#blessed.

tuyop posted:

kind of hilarious how hosed we are

Rime posted:

I wake up and stretch, in a bed filled with plastic fibers.

Rime posted:

Rime posted:

Keycard is plastic, I've lost eaten a couple.

Rime posted:

Thinkin' a local meetup in Vancouver in January, figure there should be additional tremendous content by then to LMAO over beers with and there's at least twenty thread regulars who appear to live here.

mod sassinator posted:

god drat

the thing i love about ecological catastrophe is that the rich can't escape it. but also i hate that no one can escape it

bowser posted:

This will be the killing blow for Vancouver. The first ever atmospheric glacier.

quote:

Paradise lost? Why I’m questioning life as a B.C. resident

As a resident and homeowner in the Interior of British Columbia, this year’s natural disasters have me questioning my choice to live and invest in the area I once considered Canada’s most underrated paradise.

The carefree, blue-sky summer days that I remember from my childhood in Merritt and Kamloops have become increasingly rare, and the sharp sense of optimism that seemed to spring from the ground and trees when I was young has been dulled by the now-annual threats of displacement from floods and fires.

In 2018, when I convinced my partner (a Toronto native) to move back to the Thompson-Nicola region where I’d grown up, it was with those fair-weather stories of my youth. The forests, lakes and mountains were a year-round playground, and with just a bike and some skis, there was no downside to “Super, Natural B.C.” We would live like I had when I was younger. It would be our own piece of the Canadian dream.

And besides, had she seen the property prices in the B.C. Interior? Compared to the million-dollar houses of Toronto and Vancouver, properties in my hometown of Merritt were highly affordable.

So after two years of living in a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, we purchased a four-bedroom fixer-upper in downtown Merritt, some 270 kilometres inland from Vancouver, with a mortgage of $215,000. Later, we moved to Kamloops and rented out the house in Merritt.At first, the lifestyle was as I recalled from my childhood. We enjoyed the outdoors – exercising, camping and exploring with friends. We grew fitter and developed tans.

But earlier this year the fires came – clouding our optimism, filling our lungs with smoke and our hearts with worry. We hid inside our home for much of the summer, crowding around second-hand air-conditioning units we’d hastily installed and glancing longingly at our bikes and disc-golf bags as we watched coverage of people losing their homes nearby.

One gusty night this summer during the fires, my father – unable to sleep as the flames crept up the mountain across the valley from his ranch 30 kilometres north of Merritt – gathered his horses and dogs and drove to the safety of his daughter’s house in town. Just three months later, my sister and her three young boys would make that same pilgrimage in reverse as she fled rising waters in the city.

We were away from our home when the atmospheric river came down last week. Plans to return to the Interior literally washed away overnight.

Friends share videos of the damage in Merritt, where the Coldwater River gushed past usual high-water marks and poured into the basements of downtown residents. A mobile home floated along the river before being swallowed beneath a bridge. A helicopter rescued a family trapped on their roof. My brother-in-law, a firefighter for the City of Merritt, changed his two pairs of socks on rotation – “it doesn’t matter when you can’t shower,” he texted me.

From what we know so far, our home, situated on Coldwater Avenue – named after the nearby swollen river – was miraculously spared, as it was during the fires. We were the lucky ones: A call to our insurer confirmed that inland flood damage would not have been covered under our policy.

Like the charred forests visible on the highway drives that surround it – mountainsides whose tree canopies were once as thick as hairbrushes, now reduced to spindly combs – my hometown no longer looks the same as it once did.

The optimism, that feeling of natural bounty that used to rise from the land here, has been tainted with the heaviness of potential danger. Now, when I gaze at the flowing rivers or lift my face to the falling rain, I’m filled not only with the sense of beauty and abundance, but with a fearful respect for this place’s destructive potential.

As we continue our holding pattern at a friend’s condo in Vancouver and await the reopening of routes and the repopulation of Merritt, we once again count our blessings. Among B.C. homeowners and residents, we are lucky.

Still, all this disaster so close to home makes me wonder: Might we be luckier somewhere else?

Cold on a Cob posted:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-paradise-lost-why-im-questioning-life-as-a-bc-resident/
archived, no paywall: https://archive.md/EWg0J

Horizon Burning posted:

the autism one is the one that always gets me because people tend to say things like 'oh, we're just better at detecting it these days' but it's so absurdly not the case if you work in education. there was this school i worked at where, a few decades ago, they had a sheet of exactly four kids posted in the staff room for the kids who have severe issues like autism etc. nowadays, there's like 3-4 in every year level if not more. teachers are increasingly trained to handle kids with issues like that and it's not an 'if you ever...' measure but a 'you will need this' measure. i feel like the idea that just better detection is accounting for the increasing prevalence is just cope.

as apocalyptic as climate change is, i feel like microplastic stuff is way worse.

Laterite posted:

Just lol if we get no meaningful snowpack in the Cascades this winter.

quote:

Not​ all deaths are created equal. In February 2020, the world began to panic about the novel coronavirus, which killed 2714 people that month. This made the news. In the same month, around 800,000 people died from the effects of air pollution. That didn’t. Novelty counts for a lot. At the start of the pandemic, it was considered unseemly to make comparisons like these. But comparing the value of human lives is one thing the machine of modern civilisation does relentlessly, almost invariably to prioritise and absolve the rich – when, for example, the global supply of Covid vaccines is apportioned primarily to the highest-income countries, or when the cost of natural disasters in Bangladesh is measured against the impact of sea-level rise on Miami Beach real estate, or when Joe Biden’s onetime economic adviser Lawrence Summers proposed that Africa, as a whole, was ‘vastly underpolluted’, and suggested that ‘the economic logic behind dumping a whole load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable.’

...

The environmental historian Stephen Pyne calls our era the ‘pyrocene’, a global regime of burning: coal and oil, agricultural land and forest, bush and wetland, most of it planned. The Anthropocene, Pyne says, implies dominion over nature. He prefers to emphasise the fact that, wherever you look, the earth is in flames. The residue is carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, black carbon, sulphur dioxide, and the particularly toxic grouping of small particulate matter known as PM2.5. Everything we burn, we breathe.

Hundreds of millions of people live and breathe in cities permanently clouded by airborne toxic events. In November, the authorities in Delhi closed schools and colleges indefinitely, suspended construction work, and shuttered half of the local coal plants after an episode of ‘toxic smog’ and an order from the Indian Supreme Court to institute emergency measures to combat it. The smog wasn’t new; the response was. Throughout the city, particulate matter hangs around in offices, lobbies and private homes, even those with air purifiers. It often gets so thick that it interferes with air travel. More remarkably, it has interrupted train travel, the smog making it impossible for drivers to see the tracks. Taxi drivers have filtration systems to process the particulates that sneak in. Pedestrians can’t escape it, which is one reason that, on especially smoggy days, living in Delhi is the equivalent of smoking several packets of cigarettes. The city has the highest rates of respiratory illness in the world, and 60 per cent of inhabitants diagnosed with COPD – chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – aren’t even smokers.

Across India as a whole, where more than a million people die from air pollution each year, exposure to small particulate matter has been estimated at five times the World Health Organisation’s longtime ‘safe’ level – defined as ten micrograms per cubic metre of air. This year the WHO set a new standard, at half the old level. Under the old threshold, 90 per cent of the world’s population were breathing dangerously polluted air; under the new threshold the figure is closer to 99 per cent. Of the world’s fourteen most polluted metropolises, only one (Hotan in China) is outside India. Of the 336 cities that come next on the list, 184 are in China. But this isn’t to say that air pollution is a problem in just two countries. Globally, it causes one death in five.
...

That​ everything is worse in the presence of pollution means that everything should be better in its absence. And, as best we can tell, it is. According to the National Resources Defence Council, the US Clean Air Act of 1970 is still saving 370,000 American lives every year – more than would have been saved last year had the pandemic never arrived. According to the NRDC, a single piece of legislation delivers annual economic benefits of more than $3 trillion, 32 times the cost of enacting it – benefits distributed disproportionately to the poor and marginalised. The American experience provides the basis for self-justifying indifference to pollution: according to what’s often called the ‘environmental Kuznets curve’, development makes countries dirtier before they get cleaner. This is wishful thinking, implying that pollution is an inevitable consequence of development, which can’t conceivably be achieved cleanly; and that it is in a way consensual, as if taking a job expresses a willingness to choke all the way to work. It also suggests that the effect is temporary, since societies at a certain level of wealth will refuse to put up with heavy pollution. But if more than 90 per cent of the planet’s population have lived for years in places with dangerously polluted air, 90 per cent also live where renewable energy is cheaper than dirty. This one fact renders the ‘economic bargain’ of air pollution, if it could ever be said to be credible, no better than an alibi.

...

Globally, air pollution cuts life expectancy by almost two years. The average inhabitant of Delhi would live 9.7 years longer were it not for air pollution. The figure is 8.5 years across the Indo-Gangetic plains, where 500 million people live. Cutting air pollution to the WHO standard would add 5.9 years of life expectancy to 1.38 billion Indians, 5.4 years to 164.7 million Bangladeshis and 3.9 years to 220 million Pakistanis. Annually, 349,000 stillbirths and miscarriages in South Asia can be attributed to air pollution, and 116,000 infants die from its effects in their first month.

...
And then there’s South America, where 30 per cent of the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, was lost to fire in a single year – 2020. In the Amazon, so much land is burned to clear trees for farming that the fires release three times as much carbon as all other forms of emission in Brazil – enough to make the rainforest itself, if it were a country, the world’s fifth largest emitter, and to turn the celebrated ‘carbon sink’, which might aid in our fight against warming, into a net source of global carbon. In theory, the burning could be halted, and it may at least be slowed if Lula succeeds Bolsonaro and returns to Brazil’s presidency next year. But the longer-term decline of the rainforest may lie outside the reach of national policy, as current global emissions trajectories suggest an irreversible tipping point for the region by the 2040s: less forest and more grass, less new growth and more new dying, more heat and therefore more fire. The Amazon has long been called ‘the lungs of the planet’. It may soon become a bellows. Everything we burn, we breathe.