So... I've been back in #yeg for a week and honestly I'm just depressed. Neverending #fires everywhere, people having to drive 15hrs to get to emergency centres. Absolutely unreal, and yet it isn't.
On top of that, my fave summertime hobby, #gardening, is dead, since I simply cannot be outside anymore due to the #mosquitoes. I got nine bites in twenty minutes last week and the following days were hell. They bite through clothes and bug spray 🧵 1/x
"Until last week western #Canada had been enduring a cold spring but the rapid onset of #unseasonably high temperatures, in places 10-15C above the average for early May, is causing #fires and #flooding."
Wonder what it takes for #Alberta and Albertans to connect the dots.
While people were evacuated last night from our favourite holiday spot (#ColesBay) on #Tasmania’s east coast due to fires, we (down south) received 26mm of rain in the last 24 hours and 49mm in the last 4 days. It is now 7.3oC and ‘feels like’ -0.3oC. 🤷🏼♂️
Countries have already suffered deep losses as a result of the #fires, #floods, and other disasters intensifying with #ClimateChange. They want the biggest, heaviest-polluting nations to do something about it. And they’ll be making their case at a conference presided over by an oil baron. #ClimateCrisis
The Bad Space is only one of the projects exploring different ways of moving beyond the fediverse's current reliance on instance-level blocking and blocklists. It's especially interesting to compare and contrast The Bad Space with two somewhat-similar projects:
Fediseer is another instance catalog, including endorsements as well as negative judgments about instances.
FIRES (an acronym for Fediverse Intelligence Recommendations & Replication Endpoint Server) is infrastructure for moderation advisories and recommendations.
Many thanks to @thisismissem and @Db0 for feedback on earlier versions of this post!
(Part 4 of "Golden opportunities for the fediverse – and whatever comes next")
TMW your non-stop flight out of Hawaii is suddenly cancelled at 7:00AM & every other non-stop flight out is either cancelled or booked full...
...so Hawaiian Air moves you to a one-stop flight to Maui - yes, the island currently on fire - for another flight leaving Kahului, Maui for Los Angeles...
...which just got delayed by 13hrs, meaning we'll be in the airport living at the gate & in the bathrooms like Viktor Navorski until tomorrow at noon.
Here we go again. Unhealthy AQI building in the DC area from Canada fires. Yesterday morning AQI was around 70; by last night it was over 150 and it's still there this morning. Not as bad as a few weeks ago, but bad enough.
Turkey is grappling with forest fires as temperatures continue to soar. Agricultural lands and settlements were evacuated across several provinces at the weekend. Sixteen of Sunday’s fires have been brought under control. Efforts to contain three remaining blazes, located in south Turkey’s Mersin, earthquake-stricken Hatay,...
I've seen many pyrocumulus clouds, but I've never seen a lone cloud above a small fire like this, which I saw today. It made for a great photo, too. It looks like it should be in a Wes Anderson film.
The Pantanal wetlands in western Brazil are famed as a paradise of biodiversity, but these days they have enormous clouds of smoke billowing over them, as raging wildfires reduce vast expanses to scorched earth. Known for its lush landscapes and vibrant wildlife, including jaguars, caimans, macaws and monkeys, the Pantanal is...
We have recently seen catastrophic fires in places that either are used to having them and dealing with them effectively, (California, Chile, Hawaii, Texas, Greece, Canary Islands, Spain, Italy) or in places that rarely have them (parts of Canada, UK). The fires are fed with high winds and extreme drought, are not able to be controlled, cause loss of human life and apocalyptic loss of the environment including animal and plant life. This is becoming more and more common and seasons are lasting longer or year round. The fires are burning deep under snow to spring back to life at first thaw.
So what can we do to minimize the danger to ourselves? There are a few things we can do and have been doing, but we must up the ante. Fire smart communities must go farther than sweeping leaves off patios and trimming trees. We need accelerated training of as many people as possible in firefighting and management. We need firebreaks around communities, and huge scale equipment such as community perimeter sprinklers and water reservoirs to go with them. We need massive organized groups that deal with evacuations, temporary housing, and rebuilding in the aftermath. We need regular folks to get trained and knowledgeable in a lateral way with professional firefighting. We need large scale plans of evac routes, plan B, plan C with emergency shelters for people, pets, livestock.
My family spent 1000s of dollars of savings and retirement money to have danger trees removed, power line avenues limbed and some brushing done this past summer. It's barely enough and we are broke now. The rest we must do ourselves as the brush grows, and the trees shed. But so many more people out there can't even afford that or have the means to do it themselves. We need taxes to pay for fire mitigation across the board, in every back yard and every community. We need to do this together. And we need to do this AT THE SAME TIME that we use less energy, travel less, consume less, as we transition rapidly away from any form of fossil fuel. It's hard, it's daunting, it's almost impossible, but not quite. Every area, every country has unique challenges to all of this, but if we on the ground all start now, today we might have a chance to make it better and survive.
Heatwave triggers forest fire catastrophe in Turkey (medyanews.net)
Turkey is grappling with forest fires as temperatures continue to soar. Agricultural lands and settlements were evacuated across several provinces at the weekend. Sixteen of Sunday’s fires have been brought under control. Efforts to contain three remaining blazes, located in south Turkey’s Mersin, earthquake-stricken Hatay,...
'Out of control' fires endanger wildlife in Brazilian Pantanal wetlands (phys.org)
The Pantanal wetlands in western Brazil are famed as a paradise of biodiversity, but these days they have enormous clouds of smoke billowing over them, as raging wildfires reduce vast expanses to scorched earth. Known for its lush landscapes and vibrant wildlife, including jaguars, caimans, macaws and monkeys, the Pantanal is...