Unless posted:

Enfys posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1365217571310559235

https://mobile.twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1365218446364008450

https://mobile.twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1365220320131641350

https://mobile.twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1365220923847176193

Vox Nihili posted:

This is basically what I assume the entirety of Britain looks like

Vox Nihili posted:

This is basically what I assume the entirety of Britain looks like

Vox Nihili posted:

This is basically what I assume the entirety of Britain looks like

err posted:

Did it have much trees historically?

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

I'm fairly certain Britain was literally carpeted in forest before humans showed up.

Enfys posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1365218446364008450

Trabisnikof posted:

We already have plastic rocks

quote:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/eyes-on-environment/plastic_rock_the_new_anthropogenic/

Now, new research1 in The Geological Society of America has revealed an entirely different marker of our existence: plastic rock. This new form of sediment, borne from the collision between our consumer culture and the natural world, could last for millennia in the geologic record until uncovered by some future society combing the ground for hints about its own history.


Searching 21 different locations along Kamilo Beach on the largest island of Hawaii (see map), Corcoran et al have identified this new type of rock formed from the unlikely union of heated plastic debris and surrounding sediment or volcanic rock. Many of these plastic-sediment hybrids, or 'plastiglomerates', were found in sheltered locations, clinging to rocky outcrops or filling the pores of volcanic rock. This suggests that they were formed from plastic debris heated to high temperatures in campfires and later discarded, where they combined with other sediment while still hot. In other cases, bits of basalt, coral, shells, or wood cemented into the plastic matrix of fragments of plastic containers, fishing nets, or other debris scattered along the coast.
The shores of Kamilo Beach are a perfect location to find such an unusual fusion of the anthropogenic and geologic. Trade winds blow strongly into the coast, continually upturning sand that buries plastics with other sediment to give them time to meld together. Since the beach is 12 kilometers from the nearest paved road, human visitors are rare, and those that do visit usually camp and build fires that produce more heated plastics to create the plastiglomerates. Such remote access also makes clean-up efforts fairly infrequent.

Minera posted:

i guess rime didnt pay to unban this time lol

TACD posted:

https://twitter.com/EliotJacobson/status/1533895441841917952

we did it guys, good work. take a day to celebrate and then let’s get back to it, gotta beat those numbers again next year!

quote:

As California's big cities fail to rein in their water use, rural communities are already tapped out


Gary Biggs' family hasn't had water coming out of their private well for over a decade, after a multi-year drought and overpumping by agriculture and industry.

Now, the eight-acre farm in West Goshen, California, which Biggs passed down to his son, Ryan, in the 1970s, is parched and fallow. His son and granddaughter carry in water from sources to drink and shower. They go to town to wash their clothes, Biggs says.
In recent years, the family has gone from relying on water from cisterns provided by government programs, which they say tastes terrible, to hauling water containers to and from neighbors' homes -- neighbors who are willing to share what they have left.

Biggs, 72, still remembers when the family property had a thriving orchard. When he was a teenager, he planted pecan and orange trees, while his father grew alfalfa and raised cows and sheep.
"Now, it's all dirt," Biggs, a lifelong California resident, told CNN. "Central California is dying. We're becoming a wasteland. A hot and dry wasteland."
"And God forbid, I don't know how long this drought is gonna go on," he added. "Believe it or not climate change is here, and California is a poster child for it."
As cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco struggle to cut their water use -- water that overwhelmingly comes from the state's reservoirs -- rural Californians that rely on groundwater are already tapped out. They live with the daily worry that they won't have enough water to bathe with or drink.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has pleaded with urban residents and businesses to reduce their water consumption by 15%, but water usage in March was up by 19% in cities compared to March 2020, the year the current drought began. With the state running out of water, unprecedented water cuts went into effect this week for city dwellers -- in parts of southern California, residents have been asked to cut consumption by 35% to avoid a full ban on watering later in the summer.
Scorching summer heat is also approaching. Water evaporates from the soil on hot days, which worsens the drought -- a key reason never-before-seen groundwater shortages are cropping up. Not only has there not been enough rain to fill reservoirs, the air is leeching water from what's left on the ground.
Then there's contamination from industry.
Ruth Martínez, who lives in the small, unincorporated town of Ducor in Tulare County, has been advocating for clean water for decades. In the town of roughly 600 people, mostly Latino residents, their drinking water had been contaminated with nitrate, which is typically caused by the fertilizer used in agriculture.
After several complaints from residents, Ducor received a state grant in 2015 allowing the community to drill a deeper well -- about 2,000 feet -- to access clean water. But it only operated for three years before Martínez says a new well set up shop across the street from their residential well, threatening their own water supply yet again.
"We didn't even know about it until we saw the the digging equipment, and when we saw it was drilled, and everything at the well site," Martínez told CNN. "The drought has really made it even worse, because we don't have the [water] pressure that we used to have. We've had problems with water quality and had to buy bottled water from the store and stuff like that."

Martínez, a member of Ducor's water board, says she's been fielding concerns from her neighbors who want to know what the government is going to do. She tells CNN that residents there blame agriculture and industry for exacerbating the crisis by pumping more groundwater, despite dwindling supply.
Biggs, whose family farm is in Tulare County, also points to nearby dairy farms that he says have been drilling deeper wells and pumping more water out of the ground, which leaves less water for residential use.
The groundwater under central California's rural communities hadn't recovered from the previous drought when it was hit again with the current one. And drought conditions in California have reemerged rapidly this spring. Not only did the state not get nearly enough rainfall this winter to put a dent in the drought, wintertime snowfall was painfully below average, leaving little to melt and runoff into rivers, reservoirs and groundwater.

Already, the San Joaquin Valley -- where Tulare County is located -- is in the US Drought Monitor's most severe category.
Kelsey Hinton, the communications director at the Community Water Center, a group advocating for affordable access to clean water, said the problem is complex and can be traced back to decades-old planning policies.
"The first thing that's important to understand is these communities have been historically disinvested in since the beginning," Hinton told CNN. "They weren't even included in general planning for the county, or considered viable communities that were going to continue to grow over time. But these are people's homes, it's their neighbors, they have decades of life and community, and they want to be growing and they want to have the infrastructure needed for that."

Water has long been considered a property right in California, meaning property owners can pump as much water as they like. That has become a problem in a changing climate. During droughts, water was pumped faster from the basin than it could be replenished.
The state's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, passed in 2014, was intended to address excessive pumping -- particularly from agriculture -- and to balance out depleted aquifers. Nevertheless, well-drilling permits have proliferated "with little oversight," Hinton said.
In March, Newsom issued an executive order that strictly prohibits local agencies from granting well-drilling permits for agriculture and industry, consistent with the 2014 bill, unless they perform a comprehensive review of how the drilling would impact households around them. But Hinton says the order includes temporary measures that will only last until the drought ends. Water advocates are banking on a bill to pass through the state legislature that would permanently strengthen oversight of the permitting process.
Martínez, who worked alongside César Chávez and the farmworkers movement, is a leading voice in the effort to get that bill passed quickly, as climate change accelerates drought impacts.
"We need to get together with the legislators and the different communities impacted and find out, educate ourselves on what we can do to prevent certain things from happening," she said. "All the problems that have got to do with water frustrate me. What keeps me going is I've only seen little improvement."
Biggs said seeing how drastically different the Central Valley is today, compared to when he was a child planting trees on his family's farm, there is no doubt that the climate crisis is taking a toll.
"We're in this part of the state that is slowly dying, because no one's taking us seriously," Biggs said. "I tell my grandkids as soon as you get out, leave this area, go somewhere where there's water, because this place is dying."

silicone thrills posted:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/05/us/california-rural-groundwater-crisis-climate/index.html

Ruth Martínez, who lives in the small, unincorporated town of Ducor in Tulare County, has been advocating for clean water for decades. In the town of roughly 600 people, mostly Latino residents, their drinking water had been contaminated with nitrate, which is typically caused by the fertilizer used in agriculture.

Enfys posted:

Yeah people might be surprised to discover their tap water likely has a fluctuating amount of nitrates in it, though maybe not given the vast amounts of fertilizer and animal waste run off there is from modern agriculture (not to mention sewage discharges).

I certainly was surprised when I started dabbling in keeping aquarium species extremely sensitive to nitrate levels and spent ages trying to figure out why I couldn't reduce my nitrate levels beyond a certain point and it only occurred to me to test my tap water after a very frustrating few weeks I am on a public supply and am not surrounded by farms, so I assumed there would only be trace levels if any.

It was quite awhile after planning how to set up a reverse osmosis system to keep crustaceans safe that I was finally hit with "wait a minute, water with nitrates in it is bad for mammals too wtf". Here I thought I was just drinking plastics!

The "safe" level is apparently 10mg/l but one of the biggest dangers from nitrate exposure in drinking water in it is an increased risk of colon cancer, soooooo

(nitrate contamination of water sources is almost certainly not the only (or even the main?) reason colon cancer is seeing such a drastic increase in younger people, but it's not great either given just how much agricultural runoff there is into basically every water source on the planet now)

Real hurthling! posted:

how in the goddamn hell lol

Venomous posted:

capitalism

e: also, can we not link to fascists itt, thanks? Even when they come to the right conclusions through the wrong lines of argument, you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"

mawarannahr posted:

who? George Monbiot?

Unless posted:

NYTimes

mawarannahr posted:

who? George Monbiot?

T-Paine posted:

Destroy infrastructure (legally and peacefully )

Minera posted:

i guess rime didnt pay to unban this time lol

T-Paine posted:

Love that it's illegal to discuss doing the only thing that could have ever saved us from the hell of our own creation (and could still potentially mitigate it to a worthwhile degree)

goochtit posted:

Apparently he didn't last time either, someone posted bail for him. Where is this mysterious benefactor now?

T-Paine posted:

Love that it's illegal to discuss doing the only thing that could have ever saved us from the hell of our own creation (and could still potentially mitigate it to a worthwhile degree)