mahershalalhashbaz posted:

i keep thinking about how cool it would be to have neanderthal blood. silicone thrills has a primordial right to the whole continent of europe. the forests cry out for their people

silicone thrills posted:

lol I can't believe you remember me posting that. Feels like ages ago.


Idk, it isnt great. My brother had 6 wisdom teeth. lol I think my favorite thing about all that was when his wisdom teeth started coming in and we had always joked my dad "looked like a Neanderthal" and he was like "see there's more proof" then we did 23andMe to find out which one of us was the mailmans kid and it turned out my brother and I weren't but both had "more neaderthal associated genes than 96% of all other users" and we're both just like yeah that tracks. (My sister was the mailmans kid and did not have nearly as much Neanderthal going on)


So yeah. apparently around 2% Neanderthal.


edit: I forgot that genetic research around covid says covid is probably just gonna merc the poo poo out of me if I get it so yet another reason to avoid the hell out of it. Apparently folks with Neanderthal associated genes are massively more at risk.

silicone thrills posted:

edit: I forgot that genetic research around covid says covid is probably just gonna merc the poo poo out of me if I get it so yet another reason to avoid the hell out of it. Apparently folks with Neanderthal associated genes are massively more at risk.

Fly Molo posted:

hmmm i thought 2% was average this is very concerning

Mola Yam posted:

covid's gonna finish the job that sapiens couldn't

quote:

The Pacific Crest Trail may become 'all but impossible' to hike as climate change intensifies

quote:

The Pacific Crest Trail is supposed to provide an escape from society, a place where a person can unplug and explore the wild and scenic landscapes that inspired America’s early naturalists. But increasingly it is morphing into an exhibition of ecological deterioration wrought by the warming climate.

Higher temperatures, less snow and ice, dry springs, wildfires, smoky skies and denuded forests have come to define the experience of hiking the 2,600-mile trail, which extends from Mexico to Canada through the mountains of California, Oregon and Washington. The current generation of hikers is already having to adapt.

“I’ve started carrying N95 masks with me while hiking,” said Brad Marston, a climate physics professor at Brown University who has hiked sections of the trail for the past nine years. While traversing a High Sierra segment in 2013, he said, “I had to get off the trail for a while because the smoke was too bad.”

Being driven off the trail by fire or smoke, or enduring miles of parched scenery, has become part of the standard Pacific Crest experience. The growing threats have prompted the Pacific Crest Trail Association, which operates in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, to begin shifting its mission from preserving the trail and managing hiking permits toward addressing environmental degradation head-on.

“It can no longer be ignored: Climate change is serious and pressing, and these are some of our last chances to prevent some of the worst consequences,” said Jack Haskel, the association’s trail information officer.

Wildfires are the primary source of disruption, but a drier, warmer future will likely yield all sorts of pitfalls for trail users — and particularly for the thousands of hardcore thru-hikers who attempt to trek the whole thing in a single, six-month odyssey each year.

“I knew there was a big potential for a dry year to produce a lot of fires, but I didn’t imagine so much destruction, or seeing plumes of smoke every other day, or having to turn back on trail, or having road closures almost separate our group,” Rebecca Harnish, who hiked the trail last summer, wrote in an Instagram post chronicling her journey. “It was haunting.”

A recent article drawing on climate research co-authored by Marston paints a despairing portrait of the trail’s long-term outlook. Published in the latest edition of the Pacific Crest Trail Association’s quarterly magazine, it conjures scenes of charred forests, bare glacier beds, brittle vegetation, hazy skies and hotter days.

According to the article, hikers will face heightened risk of heat stroke by the end of the century, as triple-digit summer temperatures on the trail “will become exceedingly common.” Early-season snow may be minimal, and the streams hikers rely on for drinking water may dry up, leaving no place to get water for stretches as long as 40 miles.Lightning ignitions — the top cause of wildfires in Northern California — will rise, along with the potential for recurring destructive blazes in drier landscapes. Meanwhile, atmospheric rivers will be more extreme, bringing rain events that will worsen erosion and damage the trail.

Such a holistic decline in hiking conditions could make “an unsupported trip all but impossible,” the article reads, and foreshadows “a future PCT experience unlike any we have known.”

John O’Brien, a climate scientist in Mendocino who co-authored the article with Marston, said it was important for hikers to know what is in store, because “these high-elevation areas are going to see some of the biggest changes.”

Chief among the changes is the shrinking of what constitutes an average snow season and the resulting upward creep of the snow line in California’s mountains. Parts of the Sierra could get cooked bare of snow some years within a quarter-century, according to a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.Last summer’s thru-hikers can attest to the difficulties. The Dixie Fire in the northern Sierra, which raged from July to October, torched 112 miles of the trail — an “unprecedented” impact, according to the Pacific Crest Trail Association.

In the past two years, 532 miles of the trail in California and Oregon were closed due to wildfires and 194 miles of it burned. Wayward hikers, driven out of the woods by smoke and fire, wound up in towns under evacuation orders and had to be shuttled to safety. One thru-hiker, who last year broke the speed record on the trail, recounted a surreal afternoon near Mount Shasta when smoke blotted out the sun and ash rained down from the sky.

Marston’s article represents a first public-facing step in the association’s transition; it was published as hiking season ramps up, during another year in which record numbers of people are expected on the trail. The association estimates that 1 million people set foot on the trail each year, though it’s impossible to keep an exact tally.

Marston believes the association should have recognized the issue sooner.

“I’d been frustrated trying to get the PCTA to acknowledge the import of climate change in the past,” he said. “I’m pleased that they’ve now turned the corner and are thinking hard about its effects.”
The scope of the association’s planning — which is part of a larger climate-change response among federal land agencies — is expansive.

It ranges from relocating campsites, thinning brush along the trail and warning about the dangers of backcountry campfires to advocating for government funding for trail maintenance. Last year, about $4.4 million in emergency funds via the Great American Outdoors Act were allocated to Pacific Crest Trail programs in California, Haskel said.

For hikers, drier conditions and more volatile weather necessitate greater attention to trip -planning, with consideration paid to fire danger and contingencies for evacuating the trail quickly. The association has added new trip planning tools to its website that keep up-to-date information on fires, smoke, air quality and park closures — aspects that hikers would rarely have planned around even 10 years ago.

A candid trail update from the association last August, when wildfires prompted the Forest Service to shut down California’s national forests, read, “Basically NorCal is closed.”

Forest Service staffers have become quicker to assess damage to the trail burn areas and more aggressive in early trail and forest rehabilitation work, Haskel said.

Complicating those efforts, however, is a dearth of critical volunteer labor the association relies on to maintain the enormous trail. In 2019, 2,038 volunteers chipped in about 107,000 hours of trail work, Haskel said. But the pandemic cratered participation. Last year just 1,221 volunteers performed about 55,000 hours of work.

The infusion of government funds will allow the association to revitalize its trail maintenance programs and recruit new volunteers this year, Haskel said.

“Probably the biggest impact that the (association) might have is building a strong volunteer core,” he said. “In the past few years, we’ve redoubled efforts to recruit people, especially in rural areas.”

A series of late-season storms have dusted California’s mountains with snow, but it is largely expected to melt away quickly rather than meaningfully improve drought conditions. This year could be “the absolute worst” fire season, Cal Fire officials said recently.

Trail experts anticipate another harsh summer for Pacific Crest hikers as well as the potential for more profound impacts to the high-elevation environments it passes through.

“People who did the trail 10-15 years ago, their experience is going to be very different from someone who does it 20 years hence,” O’Brien said. “People take for granted how fast our ecosystems are changing.”

silicone thrills posted:

Maybe its just based on variants? I have 311 (lmao whats worse than 911)



Neanderthals and Denisovans were too good for this world.

mawarannahr posted:

257 phrenology points over here

Fried Watermelon posted:

Baykin posted:

here's a video by BadEmpanada that shits all over the kurzgesagt one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KQYNtPl7V4

too bad even this guy still seems to think that humans are somehow gonna survive

silicone thrills posted:

lol I can't believe you remember me posting that. Feels like ages ago.

Venomous posted:

of course humans are going to survive, just that 99% of humans won't

silicone thrills posted:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/Pacific-Crest-Trail-17201697.php



lol I used to think I was gonna do the PCT sometime in my life but I guess the answer is a loud rear end NO

quote:

We’re not making a case for despair. Just the opposite.

silicone thrills posted:

lol I can't believe you remember me posting that. Feels like ages ago.


Idk, it isnt great. My brother had 6 wisdom teeth. lol I think my favorite thing about all that was when his wisdom teeth started coming in and we had always joked my dad "looked like a Neanderthal" and he was like "see there's more proof" then we did 23andMe to find out which one of us was the mailmans kid and it turned out my brother and I weren't but both had "more neaderthal associated genes than 96% of all other users" and we're both just like yeah that tracks. (My sister was the mailmans kid and did not have nearly as much Neanderthal going on)


So yeah. apparently around 2% Neanderthal.


edit: I forgot that genetic research around covid says covid is probably just gonna merc the poo poo out of me if I get it so yet another reason to avoid the hell out of it. Apparently folks with Neanderthal associated genes are massively more at risk.

SKULL.GIF posted:

https://twitter.com/MikeElgan/status/1531551098124881921

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Jesus loving christ we don't need to "recycle" plastic or make "legal and regulatory" changes to plastic production and disposal. We need to stop loving using and producing plastic what don't people get? What is misunderstood here???

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Jesus loving christ we don't need to "recycle" plastic or make "legal and regulatory" changes to plastic production and disposal. We need to stop loving using and producing plastic what don't people get? What is misunderstood here???

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Jesus loving christ we don't need to "recycle" plastic or make "legal and regulatory" changes to plastic production and disposal. We need to stop loving using and producing plastic what don't people get? What is misunderstood here???

silicone thrills posted:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/travel/article/Pacific-Crest-Trail-17201697.php

quote:

In the past two years, 532 miles of the trail in California and Oregon were closed due to wildfires and 194 miles of it burned. Wayward hikers, driven out of the woods by smoke and fire, wound up in towns under evacuation orders and had to be shuttled to safety. One thru-hiker, who last year broke the speed record on the trail, recounted a surreal afternoon near Mount Shasta when smoke blotted out the sun and ash rained down from the sky.

lol I used to think I was gonna do the PCT sometime in my life but I guess the answer is a loud rear end NO

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

Cheap
Convenient
Doesn't kill everyone

Pick 2

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

i think one problem is that it is cheap to produce, incredibly versatile and nobody has found a viable alternative that can be scaled

Nix Panicus posted:

Aluminum cans work great for things like soda and are infinitely recyclable. How much can it really save to put a drink in plastic over aluminum? That margin is what life on earth is worth

Nix Panicus posted:

Aluminum cans work great for things like soda and are infinitely recyclable. How much can it really save to put a drink in plastic over aluminum? That margin is what life on earth is worth

Nix Panicus posted:

Aluminum cans work great for things like soda and are infinitely recyclable. How much can it really save to put a drink in plastic over aluminum? That margin is what life on earth is worth

quote:

As consumer products companies hunt for more sustainable packaging options, some — notably smaller brands — are turning to aluminum as an alternative to plastic. The big draw? Aluminum is touted by some manufacturers as "infinitely recyclable," and it certainly has a much higher recycling rate in the U.S. compared to plastic, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But it might not be the sustainability silver bullet companies are counting on, according to industry experts.

...

Experts dispute just how much aluminum is recycled. While some organizations and reports point to the 80 percent rate for aluminum cans, the total recycling rate for all aluminum is more like 50 percent in the U.S, and in 2018 it was only 35 percent for aluminum packaging, according to the EPA.

"The recycling system is completely broken," said Michael Martin, founder of r.Cup. "The infrastructure needs to be addressed, and I don’t see that happening in the near future. From my perspective, the resources required, the energy required, the negative impact from the production of the material, and then the broken recycling system ends up making [aluminum] the less sustainable choice when compared to other options."

...

While it’s true aluminum has a lot to offer when compared to other materials, experts are concerned that simply swapping from one single-use material to another isn’t the best way to create a circular model for packaging.

"Companies we’ve seen [switching] from plastic to aluminum seem a little bit hasty," said Olga Kachook, senior manager of the sustainable packaging coalition at nonprofit GreenBlue. "Most of the impacts from packaging come during the sourcing and manufacturing phases. And so that can be problematic."

While aluminum cans include about 73 percent recycled content, some virgin material is always needed. So according to Kachook, if making virgin aluminum has a higher environmental impact than other materials, switching from plastic to aluminum might have unintended consequences at the start of the production process.

Transportation also pushes up the greenhouse gas emissions impact for aluminum over plastic — because it’s heavier. For example, in Ball’s own Life Cycle Assessment, a 16-ounce alumi-tek bottle, a 16-ounce standard aluminum can and a 12-ounce aluminum can all have more "global warming potential," respectively, than a 16.9-ounce standard PET bottle when transportation emissions are included.

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

I looked into this a while back, and unfortunately it just isn't true

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/should-you-swap-plastic-aluminum-packaging-its-complicated

so basically, it is not recycled nearly as much as companies claim, and it is heavier as well, which means more fuel consumption during transport