You MUST include Location: Region when sharing observations.

It's been 30 years since the concept of Great Filter was created and there's been many takes on it, so here's mine.

If we consider that the magic elves who bring us the carbon removal technology doesn't exist, then we are looking at the planet warming up with never seen before rates. This means that humans, amongst many other species (assuming life can continue) will cease to exist, as our planet grows more and more unsuitable for having life on it. This also means that yet again species have failed to colonize the space, and hence we have at least one solution to Great Filter.

One may naively produce conclusions that the issue is in consumption of fossil fuels or the issue is with capitalism or the rise of fascism, but in my opinion these are the symptoms. The question is, were we doomed since the beginning of trade or are there more to it?

Back when humans were hunter-gatherers, people had to work together to survive. Those who couldn't, perished, and strongest survived. As the technology expanded and people migrated across the planet, it wasn't always possible to rely on a herd and people started to ensure their own well being through farming, which inevitably lead to a trade. Now trade almost immediately produces capital and creates a situation where goods obtain value and hence some goods which are easier to produce are less valuable, and more difficult to obtain goods are more valuable. Don't have to go very far for concept of precious metals and money to appear.

Is it the concept of trade that causes the problems? I don't think so. I think what causes the problems is the isolation, and not being part of a community. If certain people amass more wealth which is disproportionately divided amongst "the herd", it creates a position where people will be more willing to be alone, than part of a group which does not serve them good. This creates competition, tensions. The problem didn't happen this century, not even on this millennia - this is proven by the migratory patterns of early humans.

In the past century it has gone into overdrive - we have unlocked instant communication across the planet, we have technology to move from one continent to another in mere hours, a trip which would've taken weeks hundred of years ago, and was impossible couple of hundred ago. We have social media, which divides and isolates humans more than ever. All of these could be factored into Great Filter and be an answer itself,, but I think fundamentally it is isolation, combined with the ability to self-sustain and no wealth gaps. Isolation drives the loss of empathy, and once the leaders have no empathy, there will be nothing left to lead.

For the submission: Palmer Luckey founder of the military contractor start up Anduril has invested 200 million dollars in a new start up that wants to genetically engineering dogs for the military and law enforcement. The company wants to enhance service dogs by both genetic engineering as well as via computer interfacing. As if they aren’t better things to spend money on.

Currently 3.4°C above the 1982-2010 average

Source: ClimateReanalyzer

So posted on the world news thread originally, I found this extremely interesting and alarming. Particularly in the setting of how recent Russian data centers were impacted and so many alleged changes happened along social media this is very concerning.

Lol, sure, we'll definitely get right on that....

Thoughts?

I don't see this reported enough. I think it's an issue that combine late stage capitalism, climate change, and just general human destructive behavior.

WE HAVE BEEN BREATHING BAD AIR FOR A MONTH. The API in Kuala Lumpur ranges from 100 to 200 daily. You can't see our many skyscrapers anymore. Just rough shapes on the horizon.

The haze in Southeast Asia is bad. It leaves a carbon footprint you can detect from outer space. And now it's spreading to other Indonesian islands. There are protests evolving to riots. Indonesia routinely burns forests and peatlands to clear land for agriculture, or reset plantations, but the El Niño has exacerbated the situation and it's all now out of control.

Our cat Torta is an old cat with breathing problems. She finally passed after much vet attention. I am so sad and my boyfriend is very angry. I don't comment on the Indonesian government, but the Malaysian government? That's supposed to look out for us?

They said that there will be no legal action nor will there be a diplomatic note. They don't even do anything. During COVID we had free masks and health subsidies. Now it's really truly nothing. No aid or help. Public schools for children closed but there is no work from home order. Nothing.

And they say it's going to get worse when El Niño peaks. There was hope that the Monsoon season would bring about heavy rain and help with the haze. All it does is bring forth toxic rain and the sky gets hazy again after several hours. Truly dystopian. What did our cat even do to deserve this?

EDIT:

When we first got WiFi at our new apartment, my boyfriend made a joke. He said Torta doesn't even know what WiFi is.

And Torta didn't know there is the haze. Torta didn't know why she often struggled with breathing. When we got her checked out the first time, the vet said she was a very polite cat.

Her chair is still waiting for her. There's a dent, there, in the middle.

The ecological damage the northeastern US has sustained in the last two centuries eclipses what’s currently happening in the Amazon or in most other places that receive international attention, but it never gets discussed because a lot of it happened generations ago, and because “there’s still forests left”. Like mf if it weren’t for the mass abandonment of farms in the late 1800s and the implementation of environmental regulations post WWII, the landscape here would look like Britain or the Mediterranean islands or some other completely anthropogenically altered hellscape. Nearly all of our forests were felled and most of the swamps filled in during the first few decades of the 19th century. The wolves, rattlesnakes, and mountain lions were hunted to extirpation. The bears were driven into the most remote mountains. The passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction. The construction of canals further destroyed natural hydrologies. Thankfully, many forests have regrown, but they are nowhere near what they were in pre colonial times. The chestnuts are all gone courtesy of chestnut blight. The elms are mostly gone due to Dutch elm disease. The ashes, hemlocks, and beeches are projected to become functionally extinct this century due to emerald ash borer, hemlock woody adelgid, and beech leaf disease, respectively. The white oaks are slow to reproduce and grow and haven’t recovered in these new forests. And climate change threatens the cold loving sugar maples and yellow birches. I shudder at the thought of what our forests will look like in a hundred years. Just invasive shrubs, vines and thorns that nothing eats and that don’t produce anything? Perfect habitat for ticks, which btw are exploding in number and now spread red meat allergies. Losing all these trees isn’t a loss that the ecosystem can take on the chin, they ARE the ecosystem at its lowest level. Everything else exists downstream of the trees.

And the terrible thing is, the damage which is still ongoing basically can’t be stopped. Global trade makes the spread of invasive species inevitable, and industrial pollution from 60 years ago still floats around in our waterways. More than half of all plastic ever produced has been made since 2001. Any river or lake in a populated area of this part of the country is full of Cold War era PCBs and heavy metals, pesticides, agricultural runoff, etc. I’m not familiar with any studies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if over 90% of the aquatic biomass is gone, or at least been replaced by invasive zebra mussels, gobies, and introduced (but naturalized) alewives and trout from out west.

Municipalities are more concerned with maintaining economic growth & encouraging development than preserving remaining wetlands, woodlots, etc because those things don’t produce value and we live in a system where everyone’s lives would become superhell if the big numbers ever went down.

“🤓 👆erm actually, we’ve gotten quite good at mitigating the impact of human behavior on our environment and the technology to create a sustainable future already exists, it’s just that the elite’s chokehold on the economy prevents it from being implemented” dude there may be more humans than RATS on earth. It will never be sustainable to keep 8 billion omnivorous large mammals alive in industrial society.

The collapse of the industrial system would be the most merciful thing to possibly ever happen and the continued existence of all life and of human freedom might actually depend on it.

French borrowing costs continue to increase as protests about defunded public services spread.

Previous attempts by the French Government to address the budget crisis have been met with similar protests.

The increasing unwillingness of lenders to lend the French Government money threatens to create a debt crisis where France may be forced to make unpopular spending cuts, exacerbating the protests/political unrest.

Turn on a kettle on low and what happens? It immediately begins gaining heat. The heat gain will decrease roughly linearly with temperature. If we graph the heat gain vs. temperature, it's almost a straight line. This is called the "Gregory Plot".

The heat capacity doesn't matter for the graph. It just makes it move at a different speed along the line. Drop in an ice cube if you want. It stays on the same line.

It also works if the kettle is the Earth and the flame is CO2.

That graph is an average of multiple runs of multiple models, so there's not much weather noise. It's from the 4xCO2 model experiments. Then they divide the X intercept by 2 to get the 2XCO2 ECS value. It being relatively straight is a result of the forcing not changing over the experiment. Continuously adding forcing would cause it to drift up and to the right.

The Earth's heat gain (EEI) and temperature are now observables, but for some reason, nobody ever seems to look at this graph for the actual Earth. Yes, it's noisy, but still instructive.

The high frequency noise appears to be mostly weather causing heat absorption anomalies, with the temperature trailing, leading to clockwise circles on this graph. That's as expected, but not the only reasonable possibility. I'm old enough that I can remember when the standard explanation of El Nino was spreading of the surface warm water leading net heat loss. On this graph, that would be a jump to the down and right. No, that's not what happens.

Were the 2000 ship SO2 decrease having a large positive forcing effect, it should show up on this graph as a sharp movement upward in the red area of the graph, linear because of the 12 month averaging. Instead, the EEI dropped over that period.

The El Nino ratchet effect is even more exaggerated even more on this graph than on the temperature graph, but only for 2015 and 2023 for some reason (so far). Well, since 2001. The graph wanders sharply to the up and right at the start of El Nino, and never comes back.

Given that we're at around +1.5C vs. the preindustrial with around 1.5 W/m² EEI, if the CMIP6 model averages are roughly correct for the slope of the Gregory graph at around 1C / (w/m^2), holding at the current forcing should generate around another 1.5C of warming to stabilize at +3C.

If the current generally accepted forcing estimate of 2.17 W/m² is correct, this would imply that 1.5C warming generates a heat loss of 2.17-1.5 = 0.67. Then our current EEI of 1.5 W/m² should generate a further 1.5 * 1.5 / 0.67 = 3.4C of warming for a total of +4.9C.

There's a ton of noise, and the linearity is questionable, but that's what that's what an honest simple analysis gives now. Yeah, there's probably something broken there, but we don't really know what.

Any bets on how long it will be before we see "emerging constraints" papers with the constraint based on the EEI, so we look at what happens only in the models which can match the observed EEI?

TLDR: The Earth. Warm on the right. Absorbing heat on the top. We're heading to the top right.

SS: In one of the fastest-warming places on Earth, Svalbard, a combination of local mining operations and rapid warming are leading to the contamination of the residents' water sources. Pyrite is leeching into the water, making it more acidic, which in turn leads to more trapped minerals being released, increasing to unhealthy and/or dangerous concentrations.

First it was Manganese levels that spiked, but reportedly they have dropped since. However, other contaminants have taken its place, so this issue could last a while. Related because rapid global warming is increasing the pressure on cold areas as well, challenging the viability of possible future climate refuges.

Edit: Currently the issue affects the far north, but metals exceeding safe levels in natural waters has already been reported in several places around the world.

SS: Riots and violent unrest in Milan, Lisbon, and across France feel like another sign that the social contract is breaking down. Different flashpoints, but a common theme: people are increasingly unable to afford the lives they were told hard work would provide.

I think these protests might die down in the short term, but the underlying problems aren’t going anywhere. Income inequality, unaffordable housing, stagnant purchasing power, and declining trust in institutions are putting enormous pressure on society.

To me, collapse doesn’t necessarily mean everything suddenly falls apart. It can look like a slow erosion of living standards, a shrinking middle class, and growing economic desperation until people lose faith in the system entirely.

Maybe Europe is showing us what happens when that frustration reaches a boiling point. The cracks are becoming harder to ignore, and it increasingly feels like the system is struggling to hold itself together.

Source: UK Guardian

‘French government in crisis talks after ‘colossal failure of the state’’ Angelique Chrisafis 18/10/26 16:10 BST

‘We are suffocating’: protests spread to Lisbon and Milan as housing living cost tensions intensify’ Sam Jones 18/10/26 12:02 BST

‘Why are people protesting across Europe?’ Harry Taylor 18/10/26 16:15 BTS

‘If we burn, you burn’: hundreds arrested at protests across France – in pictures’ Jim Powell 17/10/26 15:59 BST