@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

epistatacadam

@epistatacadam@toot.wales

Not a lot to say about myself. Worked as GP in valleys, then public health something to do with data of health events. Ignored mainly, you're advised to do the same. Meanwhile if you fancy seeing what I'm thinking this is quite a good place happy to be corrected as I don't know as much as I think I do. It's a common male fault. 🤣

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NationCymru, to random
@NationCymru@toot.wales avatar

Welsh Government’s glass deposit scheme will ‘wreck businesses’ https://nation.cymru/news/welsh-governments-glass-deposit-scheme-will-wreck-businesses/

epistatacadam, (edited )
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@NationCymru a bit odd that businesses thrived on returnable bottles until Schweppes decided they could make more money by only using them once. Giving credence to the view given by one Biffa waste exec, that Western economic growth was entirely based on how much it threw away. Hence the destruction of our planet...

remixtures, to uk Portuguese
@remixtures@tldr.nettime.org avatar

#UK #OSB #OnlineSafetyBill #Cybersecurity #Privacy #Encruyption #Surveillance: "The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. No amendments have been accepted that would mitigate the bill’s most dangerous elements.

If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself. Requiring government-approved software in peoples’ messaging services is an awful precedent. If the Online Safety Bill becomes British law, the damage it causes won’t stop at the borders of the U.K."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/uk-government-very-close-eroding-encryption-worldwide

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@remixtures so much for the IT and STEM based economic growth UK gov is claiming to support.

rahmstorf, to random German
@rahmstorf@fediscience.org avatar

Uhmm - not actually the Gulf Stream but the AMOC. Imprecise wording. The AMOC contributes about 15 million cubic meters per second to the Gulf Stream, the latter totals 90 million. However, the AMOC delivers the bulk of the heat transport to the north, so it is what seriously matters to climate.
Full explanation what I think about the new study here: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/07/what-is-happening-in-the-atlantic-ocean-to-the-amoc/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@rahmstorf I stand corrected!

helenczerski, (edited ) to ocean
@helenczerski@fediscience.org avatar

The ocean engine has one "big beast" component, on top of all the smaller components: a sinking of surface water in some places that is very slowly shunted around the deep until it eventually returns to the surface. There is a lot of debate about how much climate change might make it slow down or stop, but the idea that it's even a remote possibilty in the next few decades is very scary. We must decarbonise ASAP.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/25/gulf-stream-could-collapse-as-early-as-2025-study-suggests

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@helenczerski as I am reading this, I'm listening to a conservative MP saying climate warning will save lives in UK, as it will be less cold. But if Guild stream stops, then our winters will get much much colder, and our summers much much hotter. And he says we must wait for capitalism to solve the problem. What is the definition of a fool, someone who thinks doing the same thing again will result in a different outcome....
Capitalism has threatened & is making our planet uninhabitable.

breadandcircuses, to environment

In case you didn't already know, Net Zero is a scam promoted by the fossil fuel industry and their financiers to perpetuate Business As Usual for as long as possible...

"Why Net Zero is not enough"

More than 4,000 governments and companies around the world have pledged to go Net Zero. This includes more than one-third of the world’s largest publicly traded companies.

That sounds like a step in the right direction, right? If every organisation “stops emitting”, our world will be great again.

Well, not exactly…

If we continue to be in a collective delusion that Net Zero is the solution, we will be proved terribly wrong.

In "Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero is Not Enough", Holly Jean Buck discusses the implications of chasing Net Zero from various frames — looking at it not only through an environmental lens but a social justice perspective as well.

Instead of telling us to do better, this book provides different stakeholders concrete steps for planned phase-out on top of sound arguments and justification for it.

Simply put, the framework of Net Zero and its concentration on emissions diverts public and policy attention away from the fundamental task of ensuring effective and lasting climate change mitigation, which requires an unwavering end to the fossil fuel sector.

Always remember, Net Zero is NOT zero.

FULL ARTICLE -- https://archive.li/VQBar

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@breadandcircuses meet zero if done now would simply mean that the med continues to burn, pakiy continues too flood, Vermont floods whilst Canada burns, I'm currently waiting for Texas to catch fire and Florida to sink below the waves, as possibly then the republican party in the US will realise they must stop fossil fuel companies or lose their voters permanently...

jacqui76, to random

Watching the in / - listening to the tourists talk about losing their belongings. Yes it is terrible BUT what about the locals who have lost everything!

The tourists can get on plane and leave, back to their lives. However the local peoples lives have been destroyed. I know where my sympathies lies...

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@jacqui76 and they were not major contributors to global heating, unlike those who flew in...

ChrisMayLA6, to Health
@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

In a classic bit of segmentation & the use of inducing claims the market seems rife with dodgy practices & a lack of effective regulation;

moreover, with the UK having one of the lowest rates of in the world, we might wonder whether this is linked with other health issues we are confronting.

Not only do spurious health claims need to be stopped, we should ask whether formula is really the right way to go at all?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/23/baby-formula-milk-bottle-breastfeeding-manufacturers-health-claims

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@simonvarwell @ChrisMayLA6 I pushed for them too be regulated either like all other tobacco products or like all other medicinal products. Instead we got free market chaos, very profitable for the tobacco giants and no doubt those they fund in power.

davidallengreen, to random
@davidallengreen@mastodon.green avatar

Here is a list of favourite fiction writers and story tellers:

Jane Austen (the Master); James Joyce; Virginia Woolf; Stella Gibbons; Muriel Spark; Italo Calvino; Franz Kafka; Kazuo Ishiguro; Joseph Conrad; Angela Carter.

And in the comics medium: Alan Moore; Neil Gaiman; Posy Simmonds.

If you are also a fan of any of these, I would be delighted to chat with you about them in the comments.

I would also like to hear of any writers similar to the ones I list who I should try.

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@davidallengreen why have you not included George Elliott she was clearly a master of story telling.
Silas Marner
Mill on the Floss
Romola
Felix Holt, the radical
Middlemarch
There were several other novels but I forget their names, as we're some serious works of thought and translation.
She altered my view if the world as a sallow youth, so I hold her as a great writer.

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@davidallengreen
Each to their own I guess. I must admit I found Jane Austin very hard work.

*Ducks for cover! 😉

breadandcircuses, to environment

James Hansen is one of the world's leading climate scientists. Back in 1988, he famously issued a warning to the US Congress that the age of climate change had arrived, and stated that urgent action was required to avoid the worst outcomes.

Since then, of course, almost nothing has happened. Well, no, that's not quite true. Since 1988, the US and other major polluters have greatly increased greenhouse gas emissions, not reduced them!

Hansen has continued over the years to study the climate, both past and present, and has regularly updated his findings, adding even more urgent warnings. Still, no one pays much attention.

Last week, Hansen and his colleagues, Makiko Sato and Reto Ruedy, provided yet another message about the severity of the climate crisis. New research, they say, shows that the rate of global warming may in fact be accelerating.

This suggests that various tipping points may already have been crossed. Earth's climate system could now be entering a phase change, or, as they put it, reaching "a new climate frontier."

Here is an excerpt from their latest update...

Suspicion that we are headed into new climate territory, not seen in the past million years, is fueled by the present extraordinarily large Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI).

EEI is the proximate cause of global warming: as long as more energy is coming in than going out, we must expect global warming to continue. Given the acceleration of EEI in the past several years, we anticipate an acceleration of global warming.

The 2023-24 temperature curve is likely to fall substantially above the curve for the prior El Niño, and may set new global temperature records continually during the next 12 months. It seems that we are headed into a new frontier of global climate.

READ MORE -- https://mailchi.mp/caa/the-climate-dice-are-loaded-now-a-new-frontier

ABOUT JAMES HANSEN -- https://csas.earth.columbia.edu/about/people/james-e-hansen

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@breadandcircuses my only concern with this paper is, should we not be using a non linear fit. On past evidence the earth once life started, so Gia was in the game, the world has switched from various stable levels, disposing of most life forms in an excruciatingly painful way, on the way to a new stable state. We've fouled our nest effectively & currently are on an positive feedback loop which only by concerned action in all sectors can we reverse. We could, but will we?
The pandemic says no!

juandesant, to random
@juandesant@astrodon.social avatar

I just can’t believe it. I just saw someone giving a stroll to a kid in a trolley, and the kid was watching things on a screen. How is this person going to evolve any curiosity in the surroundings if they are just watching a screen? And let’s not ask ourselves about developing myopia…

Am I starting to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud?

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@juandesant but some is old men have a tiny bit of wisdom having grown up before such things existed.... Embrace maturity with pride, you avoided the anxiety child of young people from disease, war, starvation etc...

helenczerski, to climate
@helenczerski@fediscience.org avatar

The engineering faculty I work in used to have “Change the World” as a slogan. I never liked it and I’ve just worked out why. It’s because The World is fine. What we need to be doing is changing ourselves so that we fit in with our fully functioning life support system - Earth - learning how to work with the great planetary cycles that keep us alive rather than against them.

Maybe the new engineering slogan should be “Working out how to do better”.

epistatacadam,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@helenczerski my parents were both civil engineers, now gone to improve the other place. Their motto was "Do more safely for less resources." They instilled in me the belief that using brute force(& ignorance) to do something was the sign of poor thinking. So keeping warm, insulate the house well then a small source of warmth will keep you toasty, & keep you cool in hot weather.

davidallengreen, to random
@davidallengreen@mastodon.green avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @davidallengreen I wonder how much is due to a previous commissioner with a record of making fatal (for others) mistakes, obstructing the investigation...?

    ChrisMayLA6, to Teachers
    @ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

    I understand unions were told there would be no offer at all if it wasn't recommended to members;

    However, it now looks possible that have seen though the under-funded promises & the thinness of the promises for future (staged) rises;

    But, if rumours are right, teachers may vote to reject the offer, leaving the teaching unions in the same place as the unions, with a rejected offer but little appetite for further ;

    meaning the have sort of won?

    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @ChrisMayLA6 a pyrrhic victory I suspect. As with the NHS government ministers and regrettably civil servants have a very short life span compared to those they regard like themselves as disposable. The problem as we have seen is that to get good ministers & civil servants then you need experience in that department, so the corporate memory is kept fresh. Turnover of teachers disrupts education, turnover of clinical staff disrupts patient and population health.

    cdavies, to random
    @cdavies@mastodon.scot avatar

    Can we start getting rid of 'low-value' government ministers now?

    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @tired_angry @cdavies @duckwhistle @markusl do let know if you find one, possibly in a lowly level ministerial post.

    ChrisMayLA6, to random
    @ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

    Every weekend in the press at the moment I seem to find one or other prominent and/or political commentator, claiming that:

    [policy x] is not working, but that's because [policy x] hasn't been implemented in the way it should... it must be done as I intended.

    From , to , from to , somehow those who were instrumental in imposing the 'solutions' on us, think they can escape blame by claiming 'its not being done properly'!

    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @autoerot1ca @ChrisMayLA6 I can't help wondering if part of the problem is that everyone seems to agree that one size/set of rules suits all. The advantage of common law was that law evolved differently to suit local custom and practice. But political groups want to make one law but as we have seen with race the problem is that the results can be bigger divisions within groups. So we need universal principles with local interpretation... Perhaps.

    epistatacadam, to random
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    I wonder when a Welsh hospital will be built so that the easiest way to get to outpatients and for staff to work, will be by rail or bus? Currently they seem to be intent on doing the same as at the Heath. Large car parks, impossible by public transport, and clogged roads. No vision for the future. Clearly emergency transport will need to be door to door, but most people do not arrive by ambulance.... And even in emergencies a surprising number arrive by other routes. Eg. Clapham train crash.

    breadandcircuses, to environment

    This is no fun. It feels like I'm in hell, having to report all this terrible news. But if we don't know what's happening, we can't prepare for what's coming...

    "Catastrophic climate 'doom loops' could start in just 15 years, new study warns"

    Earth's ecosystems may be careering toward collapse much sooner than scientists thought, a new study of our planet's warming climate has warned.

    According to the research, more than a fifth of the world's potentially catastrophic tipping points — such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, and the sudden transformation of the Amazon rainforest into savanna — could occur as soon as 2038.

    In climatology, a "tipping point" is the threshold beyond which a localized climate system, or "tipping element," irreversibly changes. For instance, if the Greenland ice sheet were to collapse, it would also reduce snowfall in the northern part of the island, making large parts of the sheet irretrievable.

    Yet the science behind these dramatic transformations is poorly understood and often based on oversimplified models. Now, a new attempt to understand their inner workings, published June 22 in the journal Nature, has revealed that they may happen much sooner than we thought.

    "Over a fifth of ecosystems worldwide are in danger of collapsing," co-author Simon Willcock, a professor of sustainability at Bangor University in the U.K., said in a statement. "However, ongoing stresses and extreme events interact to accelerate rapid changes that may well be out of our control. Once these reach a tipping point, it's too late."

    FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/climate-change/catastrophic-climate-doom-loops-could-start-in-just-15-years-new-study-warns

    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @breadandcircuses I'm surprised we have as much as fifteen years to prepare for Armageddon! I think we should work on the basis of five then we may have a bit of spare time to make even better preparations for all the world.

    glynmoody, to random
    @glynmoody@mastodon.social avatar

    Reform calls after Johnson found to have broken rules over Daily Mail job - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/27/reform-calls-after-johnson-found-to-have-broken-rules-over-daily-mail-job gosh, what a surprise...

    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @glynmoody perhaps pass a law forbidding anyone who has breach parliamentary rules from all public offices and employment for five terms of parliament or 20 years which ever is longer. That includes seats in HoL.

    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @glynmoody so sanction is required.

    LauraKT, to random
    @LauraKT@mas.to avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @LauraKT funny that my mum met him when he had Mayor, assumed him up as a lying philanderer with no consience. She was 85+ then. Despaired of the country she had served since the war, that it could appoint such a thing as PM. She's dead now but saw out the queen. She had hoped to see him kicked out of the UK back to the USA where they could keep him.

    ChrisMayLA6, to random
    @ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

    I missed that the HoC Privileges is now going to produce a further report on the attacks & intimidation it was subject to while preparing the report;

    this is starting to have the feel of a proper spring clean around the political practices of the Johnson era.

    is this the beginning of the end for the most caustic elements of the party?

    We can but hope.

    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @ChrisMayLA6 he purged all the remaining traditional one nation type of Tory, before the last election. Only Alex fans allowed to be selected. So it will need a new party to replace them.
    Not sure the current opposition is markedly different, though some members clearly are.

    ChrisMayLA6, to random
    @ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

    Here's an interesting piece by Rowan Atkinson on the Q. of whether you should buy a new or continue to use your old petrol car a while longer:

    its clear that an old car's costs are largely already accounted for so its only the marginal environmental costs of usage that we should factor into our considerations;

    so rather than buy , we might be better refusing the three year cycle of replacement, & then trying to drive less

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/03/electric-vehicles-early-adopter-petrol-car-ev-environment-rowan-atkinson

    epistatacadam,
    @epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

    @andycarolan @ChrisMayLA6 time to roll out the South Yorkshire experiment from the 1970's before Mrs deregulated and privatised everything. Journey times shortened, pollution fell, costs to local government dropped despite heavy subsidy to buses. Now we have the last and lousy exoensive service and congestion.

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