Be Excellent To Each Other

Which is slightly loaded with bullshit. I like the bit where they say they could theoretically move it from June (it is in July) to September, but the cycling calendar is too crowded to do so.

Yes, over a 87 year horizon, there is no capacity to consider moving the single most prestigious event, consistently, for the history of a cycling as a sport, as there is no way that they would consider changing the date of another event of secondary importance.

Also, apparently, they can't run the tour if the temperature on the streets of Paris is not favourable to spectators. The average temperature would vary to higher ranges, but the graphs aren't giving certainty that it would be hotter than a Qatar summer for those 3 hours of the year.

But they say on the website!

To quote the greatest philosopher of our time. "life will find a way"

How come every single thing reported on climate change always will have catastrophic consequences in the next 20 years or so?

At least the methane will solve the oil crisis...

HA! I've just moved on top of a hill! HAHAH! COWER PUNY HUMANS!

I'm pretty sure that the last thing anyone is going to be giving a toss about is a bicycle race.

La Grande Boucle is more important than many things.

There wsa a really interestring program about CCD on the TV recently. I think it was a Horizon one. The sheer scale of the problem is miond boggling, also, how many bees are used in California alone.

Genuine question:

Why can't we do what bees do? What part of the process do they provide that cannot be replicated by science?

humans pollinating things on an agribusiness scale would be a bit of a task.

By hand, sure - but can't we just spray pollen around? Not sure it's a job Curio would want to do, mind.

The gains in crops would be lost in Claritin production

How would you harvest the pollen? The ebst way to do it, having given it about 3 seconds of thought, would proabbly to make a tree shkaing device and then use a big fan to blow the pollen aorund. Although this might not be that efficient.

Can we not GM up a massive fucking pollen plant, harvest on an industrial scale, then basically use crop dusters to pollinate everything?

Obviously saving bees is better (if they promise not to sting me).

You'd be expsoed to the same risks as huge monocultures, so would stilll need broad spectrum pesticides and whatnot.

I'm more worried about chocolate, coffee, pasta, and more.

Your mum sprays her pollen around by hand.

And that is another job I don't want to be involved in.

Why can't we GM up a massive fucking pollen plant with preprogrammed genetic variation in its pollen production?

Because, science.

EDIT: The path of least resistance to do this would be to replace the host's DNA polymerase with a non error checking one. That'll increase your error rate when duplicating by quite a bit thus variety increases. You'll get lots of things that do nothing, though. However, many plants carry multiple copies of their genome so this might cause problems further down the line. it won't be at all efficient.

Then can we not create mechanical bees?

I think nano-robo-bees may be the only workable solution, to be honest.

But then, I think that is the solution to most things. YMMV.

Though mechanical bees can bring about the end of the world. See 'Angelmaker' by Nick Harkaway for details.

Hi 5 India!

http://m.motherjones.com/environment/20 ... t-collapse



Could be fifteen feet of rise is now inevitable.

Ah yes, but a recent study sponsored by Shell and Exxon reported that it was like that when they got there, and we shouldn't worry at all. Now look at the shiny thing over there!

Who cares! It won't happen until I'm long dead!

Brilliant clip about climate change doing the rounds from John Olivers new HBO show. Would link but at work.

Of course if 15 feet is inevitable, then the argument now follows we should do nothing to aim to prevent it, and reinvest all of that expenditure into protection rather than prevention.

The message could be provided in a better format than received in the past week or so - dig deeper and the 15ft is over a millenium, not by half two next Wednesday.

Here's the John Oliver clip.

Basically everything he does makes me laugh a lot.

Someone at work said that with my dark hair, rants, new glasses and slight brummie twang when excited, that I reminded them of John Oliver yesterday.

I did a baby wee at this news, but then realised that they missed out 'funny'

Huh? Isn't he blonde?

And from London or Surrey, or somewhere thataways?

What you're thinking of there is Gordon Ramsay. I look nothing like him.

Fuck you, Chris.

Heh

Hehe, no, he's Scottish, I think

Nope.



I've no idea who you're thinking of this time.

Throughsilver better get himself back to the gym.

Ugh... Why do they feel the need to jazz articles up with pithy comments like that, that are easily attacked and shown to be misleading.

Just show the graphs of data, that is plenty powerful enough!

Evidently it isn't.

Wasn't last winter the coldest and snowiest in decades for much of the northeast and midwest?

An environmental disaster in Canada doesn't make the news anywhere else, presumably because it doesn't involve oil.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/tailings ... ard-of-714

That's horrendous.

Just watched a very good documentary about nuclear energy, called Pandora's Promise. It should give anyone who is instinctively anti-nuclear but enjoys having their assumptions challenged some pause for thought.

Looks like we could be up for a cheeky El Ninõ!

'There is not a politician on earth wants to tell his or her constituents, "We've probably already blown our chance to avoid substantial suffering, but if we work really hard and devote our lives to the cause, we can somewhat reduce the even worse suffering that awaits our grandchildren."'

'Yet here we are. The fact is, on our current trajectory, in the absence of substantial new climate policy, we are heading for up to 4°C and maybe higher by the end of the century. That will be, on any clear reading of the available evidence, catastrophic. We are headed for disaster — slowly, yes, but surely.

'Even as many climate experts are now arguing that 2°C is an inadequate target, that it already represents unacceptable harms, we are facing a situation in which limiting temperature even to 3°C requires heroic policy and technology changes (or some very, very good news about climate sensitivity).'

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/15/8612113/tr ... ate-change

Oh good, we can all keep driving our cars forever, because today it looks like it's boars we need to worry about.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... -pollution



Er... Goodness.

Damn boars. They're so tasty too.


\
"We destroy your planet, puny earthlings"

STUPID BOARS

Just in.. Court orders dutch state to reduce climate emissions..

No english source yet, but this is quite important

Background
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32300214