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Socio-Economic Instability and the Scaling of Energy Use with Population Size (2015)
journals.plos.org Socio-Economic Instability and the Scaling of Energy Use with Population Size

The size of the human population is relevant to the development of a sustainable world, yet the forces setting growth or declines in the human population are poorly understood. Generally, population growth rates depend on whether new individuals compete for the same energy (leading to Malthusian or ...

Socio-Economic Instability and the Scaling of Energy Use with Population Size
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#282: Built to order
surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com #282: Built to order

SCOPING THE COMING CRISIS As you may know, the central contention of the Surplus Energy Economics thesis is the absolute necessity of thinking in terms of two economies. These are the “real” econom…

#282: Built to order
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Wind Cannot Power Manufacturing
  • Renewables are currently only fossil fuel multipliers. Mining, transport, high temperature industrial processes and 24/7 industrial processes can't be run on variable electricity sources, especially expensive ones with borderline EROEI.

    And, of course, if we'd get the cheap abundant magic energy sources we would just reach resource exhaustion and ecosystem crash even sooner.

  • Motherboards and systems with China's Loongson CPUs now shipping to US customers — options start from $373 for a DTX board with processor and cooler
  • In a Linux distribution for a particular architecture all code is compiled to the underlying CPU architecture. Packages can also be built from source.

    Proprietary software is different since it doesn't give you the freedom to build things from scratch. There are emulators, of course, but they all fundamentally suck.

  • Real wealth: Howard T. Odum’s energy economics — Rex Weyler (2017)
    www.rexweyler.ca Real wealth: Howard T. Odum’s energy economics — Rex Weyler

    Money and market values cannot be used to evaluate real wealth from the environment. – Howard T. Odum In the 1970s, Howard T. Odum explained human economics using ecology and energy fundamentals. His work remains essential for ecologists, who imagine achieving “sustainability.” His 1974 “Energy, E

    Real wealth: Howard T. Odum’s energy economics — Rex Weyler
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    Hurricane Beryl Becomes A Category 5; Shattering Record For Earliest Cat 5 by Weeks
  • Given https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/ not really surprising. Weather is a heat engine, and there's a lot of energy in the system.

    Given that we now seem to have baked in at least 4 K warming, possibly as early as end of this century, humanity (what is left of it) is going to see something way outside of historic records.

  • 2019: Peak (Western) Civilization
  • Some bloggers still do. But most people are energy blind, so they fail to see its significance.

    But even fracking is on its last legs, yes. And seems the first bottleneck is diesel and bunker fuel, since tight oil is so light while the fracking rigs burn a lot of diesel per unit extracted.

  • Cascading oxygen loss shoreward in the oceans: Insights from the Cambrian SPICE event
  • Relevant passage:

    Applying our model to today’s atmosphere-ocean state with an enhanced anthropogenic P flux from land in a sustained 130% excess over average Phanerozoic continental P weathering rates will ultimately trigger the anoxia-P-dependent cascade again in a manner that locks the oceans into an extensively anoxic state for more than half a million years. The oceanic redox state passes a tipping point when the oceanic P/O2 ratio is ∼2.3 and continues into a eutrophic ocean state with 3.5 times higher P/O2 than today and sustained high productivity and organic C burial. The Earth system tips back into the oxic ocean state as atmospheric O2 levels rise and cause oceanic P/O2 ratio to decline below the tipping point (Figure 4). The dynamics of the event depend critically on the formulation of the anoxia function, which is assumed represented by a sigmoidal function with parameters calibrated in 3D (GENIE)64 and 1D (CANOPS)65 Earth System models. The new sedimentation-dependent formulation of the benthic P flux does make the oceans more sensitive towards runaway anoxia when anoxia develops in shallower depths, but our model still requires a long period (>104 years) of sustained P input to pass the tipping point for global marine anoxia today. With oceanic P input at a sustained 130% excess over average Phanerozoic continental P weathering rates for ∼120 ka, anthropogenic forcing will eventually trigger the anoxia-P-dependent cascade in a manner that locks the oceans into an extensively anoxic ocean state for more than 0.5 Ma until oceanic P/O2 begins to decline as a result of rising atmospheric O2 levels (Figure 4).

  • Loneliness Dynamics and Physical Health Symptomology Among Midlife Adults in Daily Life

    Abstract

    Objective: The current study examined how average daily loneliness (between-persons [BPs]), intraindividual variability in loneliness across days (within-persons [WPs]), and loneliness stability informed physical health symptomatology. Method: We utilized daily diary data from a national sample of 1,538 middle-aged adults (Mage = 51.02; 57.61% women) who completed eight end-of-day telephone interviews about daily experiences, including loneliness and physical health symptoms (e.g., headaches, nausea). Via multilevel modeling, we examined average daily loneliness (BPs), intraindividual variability in loneliness (WPs), stability in loneliness (individual mean-squared successive difference) in association with the number and average severity of daily physical health symptoms. Results: When participants were less lonely on average, and on days when loneliness was lower than a person’s average, they had fewer and less severe physical health symptoms. Additionally, participants who were more stable in loneliness across 8 days had less severe physical health symptoms. Further, there was a stronger association between instability in loneliness and more physical health symptoms for people who were lonelier on average. Finally, the increase in physical health symptom severity associated with WP loneliness was strongest for participants with low variability in loneliness. Conclusion: Loneliness is associated with physical health symptoms on a day-to-day basis, especially for people who are highly variable in loneliness. Considerations of multiple sources of variation in daily loneliness may be necessary to adequately address loneliness and promote health. Public health interventions addressing loneliness may be most effective if they support social connectedness in people’s everyday lives in ways that promote stable, low levels of loneliness.

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    Cascading oxygen loss shoreward in the oceans: Insights from the Cambrian SPICE event

    Summary

    Marine euxinia can amplify phosphorous-limited marine productivity by recycling phosphorous from sediments, creating a feedback loop that increases marine oxygen consumption and ultimately leads to widespread oceanic anoxia. This phenomenon is potentially more dangerous when oxygen loss arises in coastal zones. Here, we present empirical evidence and show that this cascade was set off in the Cambrian Earth system. Carbon isotopes and Mo enrichments in well-dated sediment records from the Steptoean Positive Carbon Isotope Excursion (SPICE) event reveal a rapid decline over 130 ± 30 ka to persistently low Mo levels for 1.0 ± 0.2 Ma, followed by a slower recovery. Using dynamic models for the global biogeochemical cycles, we demonstrate that marine anoxia expanded globally through a self-cascading feedback mechanism. Importantly, we find that the benthic phosphorous flux likely scaled with sedimentation, and that chemocline shoaling into coastal areas likely triggered the SPICE event. We evaluate the risk of passing the tipping point for global-scale anoxia today.

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    2019: Peak (Western) Civilization
    thehonestsorcerer.substack.com 2019: Peak (Western) Civilization

    According to the plot of the movie, The Matrix, robots had won the war on humanity and put each and every one of us into a virtual reality prison; taking our minds back to the “peak of our civilization, 1999”. Based on the data published by the Energy Institute just recently, the Wachowskis were jus...

    2019: Peak (Western) Civilization
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    I saw first-hand just how much fracking destroys the earth
  • If you look at the numbers, we're not transitioning away from fossil to renewable. We're increasing fossil use while adding renewable on top of it. The fraction of fossil in the primary energy use remains about the same.

  • Pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in a human fungal pathogen are enabled by mutagenesis induced by mammalian body temperature - Nature Microbiology
    www.nature.com Pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in a human fungal pathogen are enabled by mutagenesis induced by mammalian body temperature - Nature Microbiology

    Development of pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in Rhodosporidiobolus fluvialis are enabled by mutagenesis induced by mammalian body temperature.

    Pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in a human fungal pathogen are enabled by mutagenesis induced by mammalian body temperature - Nature Microbiology

    Abstract

    The continuing emergence of invasive fungal pathogens poses an increasing threat to public health. Here, through the China Hospital Invasive Fungal Surveillance Net programme, we identified two independent cases of human infection with a previously undescribed invasive fungal pathogen, Rhodosporidiobolus fluvialis, from a genus in which many species are highly resistant to fluconazole and caspofungin. We demonstrate that R. fluvialis can undergo yeast-to-pseudohyphal transition and that pseudohyphal growth enhances its virulence, revealed by the development of a mouse model. Furthermore, we show that mouse infection or mammalian body temperature induces its mutagenesis, allowing the emergence of hypervirulent mutants favouring pseudohyphal growth. Temperature-induced mutagenesis can also elicit the development of pan-resistance to three of the most commonly used first-line antifungals (fluconazole, caspofungin and amphotericin B) in different Rhodosporidiobolus species. Furthermore, polymyxin B was found to exhibit potent activity against the pan-resistant Rhodosporidiobolus mutants. Collectively, by identifying and characterizing a fungal pathogen in the drug-resistant genus Rhodosporidiobolus, we provide evidence that temperature-dependent mutagenesis can enable the development of pan-drug resistance and hypervirulence in fungi, and support the idea that global warming can promote the evolution of new fungal pathogens.

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    The growing carbon debt
    www.theclimatebrink.com The growing carbon debt

    Why the climate change is different from other environmental challenges

    The growing carbon debt
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    Substantial contribution of slush to meltwater area across Antarctic ice shelves - Nature Geoscience
    www.nature.com Substantial contribution of slush to meltwater area across Antarctic ice shelves - Nature Geoscience

    Analysis of satellite imagery suggests that slush accounts for approximately half of the total meltwater area across Antarctic ice shelves.

    Substantial contribution of slush to meltwater area across Antarctic ice shelves - Nature Geoscience

    Abstract

    Surface melting occurs across many of Antarctica’s ice shelves, mainly during the austral summer. The onset, duration, area and fate of surface melting varies spatially and temporally, and the resultant surface meltwater is stored as ponded water (lakes) or as slush (saturated firn or snow), with implications for ice-shelf hydrofracture, firn air content reduction, surface energy balance and thermal evolution. This study applies a machine-learning method to the entire Landsat 8 image catalogue to derive monthly records of slush and ponded water area across 57 ice shelves between 2013 and 2021. We find that slush and ponded water occupy roughly equal areas of Antarctica’s ice shelves in January, with inter-regional variations in partitioning. This suggests that studies that neglect slush may substantially underestimate the area of ice shelves covered by surface meltwater. Furthermore, we found that adjusting the surface albedo in a regional climate model to account for the lower albedo of surface meltwater resulted in 2.8 times greater snowmelt across five representative ice shelves. This extra melt is currently unaccounted for in regional climate models, which may lead to underestimates in projections of ice-sheet melting and ice-shelf stability.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)EL
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