Thursday, October 10, 2013

Links

How Disaster-Hungry Pop Culture Ignored the Biggest Disaster of All | Motherboard
Sadly, however, American cinema has given moviegoers very little dystopian climate change fare with which to imagine a hothouse apocalypse.
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Without the gut-punch of nuclear bombs or the immediacy of plagues, climate change has largely been relegated to being a disaster of literary fiction. Where's our pulp? Where are the big budget hamfests? Where are the super villains that plot to exterminate human life by magnifying the sun's rays? The treacherous oil company CEOs shredding scientific documents? Where are our flooded, scorching, disease-ridden climate dystopias, wherein survivors shake their heads and wonder how they let this shit happen? Where is the cultural pathos of climate change?
THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: New paper finds SW Pacific Ocean surface temperatures were about the same as today, ~200,000 years ago
A new paper published in Quaternary Research finds sea surface temperatures in the SW Pacific Ocean were about the same as the present 200,000 years ago. According to the authors, "Statistical results suggest that annual averages of sea-surface temperature (SST) and salinity (SSS) at ~ 197,000 [years ago] were not significantly different from and ~ 1.2 higher than at present, respectively."

1 comment:

Beale said...

"Where are the super villains that plot to exterminate human life by magnifying the sun's rays?" Where, indeed?
No doubt the problem is that nobody knows how to make this and the other scenarios anything but laughable.