human actions, global climate change, global human solutions by 1kiki

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human actions, global climate change, global human solutions

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 09:38
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Friday, July 10, 2026 8:35 AM

Wow... I'm just looking at other bullshit you've posted in this thread.

Man... I wish I cared enough to start going back through all of your posts here and just shove all of the bullshit that never happened right up your ass.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2026 6:10 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Europe’s Summer of Reckoning Is ‘Just the Beginning’

The continent is experiencing some of its biggest fires and highest temperatures ever. Residents are fleeing, leaders are struggling to respond and “it will get worse,” one climate expert said.

By Mark Landler and Chico Harlan | July 29, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/world/europe/summer-heat-wave-fires
-climate-change.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2VA.0R-X.wlgd__cj5u73&smid=tw-share

A dense, yellow-orange pall hung over Bordeaux on Sunday, blotting out the sun and blurring the spires of the cathedral in this French city. A swirl of tiny ash particles stung eyes and stuck in throats. Twenty miles west of town, a mammoth forest fire burned so ferociously that it generated its own weather system.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was driven out of his home by the approaching flames. He could have been speaking for millions of people across Europe.

Ravenous fires. Searing heat waves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval — ruinous wars, deadly pandemics — it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.

It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

It has forced the cancellation of concerts and festivals, curtailed the final stage of the Tour de France cycling race and closed the Louvre Museum and Eiffel Tower early. It brought wildfires to the Scottish Highlands. It led organizers in London to call off a conference on how to cope with extreme heat. And it caused at least 10,000 heat-related deaths across Europe in June alone — a number that may turn out to be an undercount.

“Europe is ground zero when it comes to impacts” from climate change, said Johan Rockström, a Swedish scientist who is the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

“2026 is just the beginning,” Professor Rockström added. “It will inevitably get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I’m afraid, we’ll be passing the limits of adaptation.”

Europe is not alone, of course. Heat waves gripped Australia and Japan this year. Floods devastated Kenya and Angola. A snowstorm paralyzed the Eastern United States. Developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere are still more vulnerable than wealthy Europe to the effects of a changing climate.

Yet no other continent has warmed as rapidly as Europe, at nearly twice the global average since the mid-1990s. That has forced Europeans to confront, more starkly than others, the harsh realities of a changed climate, particularly in the summer, when their once-mild days have given way to furnacelike heat.

Though still cooler than other parts of the world, like the American Southwest or the Persian Gulf region, Europe is less able to cope because its buildings are often without air-conditioning and were built to retain heat. The homogeneity of the trees on its hillsides and coastal plains, many of which were planted during cooler, wetter periods, make them dangerously flammable during fire season.

“With this heat wave and these fires, you can say it starts to become unbearable,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a Swiss climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Whether it leads to drastic new measures — either to mitigate the effects of a warmer climate or to adapt to them — is another question.

In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared a “climate emergency,” which he said would necessitate a state pact to “attack the root of the problem in a structural way.” In France, President Emmanuel Macron vowed to replant the vast pine forests that were burned in the Gironde region over the last week with different species of trees that are better suited to a dry, hot climate.

“The situation we’re in today is the most difficult we’ve ever recorded, the most difficult since World War II,” Mr. Macron said.

Yet for all the urgency, Europe’s commitment to reduce carbon dioxide emissions — a goal that scientists say is the only conclusive way to curb climate change — is in danger of being watered down. This month, the European Union proposed to adjust rules so that some industries could pollute at slightly higher levels, further into the future.

“Net zero” policies, which aim to balance the greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere with the amount removed, have become inviting targets for critics, particularly on the right, who condemn them as a luxury Europe can’t afford during a period of weak economic growth and energy insecurity. And no matter what Europe does, the global trajectory depends on China and the United States, where President Trump has called climate change a “con job,” as well as on energy-hungry developing countries.

“We have Ursula von der Leyen struggling to maintain the current commitment,” Professor Rockström said, referring to the president of the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm. “What’s happening in France and Spain means that we should increase our ambition level, not reduce it.”

One way to do that, he said, is to educate the public about the causal link between a warming climate and the calamitous fires of the last week. The disaster unfolded in a vicious, if entirely logical, chain reaction.

First, record-setting heat waves dried out soil and vegetation, which had become abundant after a wet winter. Then, wildfires near Bordeaux and the Spanish capital, Madrid, feasted on that kindling. On Wednesday morning, officials in Gironde said the fire had been stable overnight. But a fresh heat wave threatened to worsen conditions just as firefighters were making progress in containing it.

Earlier hot spells exposed other European vulnerabilities. In late June, train operators canceled routes and France temporarily halted several nuclear reactors to avoid discharging overheated water into already-warm rivers. As a drought intensified, low water levels in the Danube and Rhine Rivers snarled river traffic.

Europe’s status as the fastest-warming continent is a consequence of both changing weather patterns and its proximity to the Arctic, where reduced snow and ice lead to more dark surfaces that absorb heat.
Smoke rising last week from wildfires in Le Porge, southwestern France, a village badly damaged by the blazes.

The continent is more than 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than it was three decades ago, and the rise in temperature is swift enough to be noticeable over a single generation. By the start of this week, France had recorded 53 heat waves since 1947; 28 of them occurred in the last 15 years.

Bordeaux never experienced a day with temperatures at or above 39 degrees Celsius (102.2 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1921 and 2000, according to Météo-France, the national climate and weather service. This summer, it has happened eight times, including on Wednesday, and the season is not even half over. Bordeaux’s winemakers, already beleaguered by the heat, now worry about smoke tainting their famous vineyards.

Friederike Otto, a German climatologist at Imperial College London, said “jet-stream” wind patterns and high-pressure systems once could lock in days of “nice-ish summer weather” in Europe. Now, she said, those same dynamics produce excruciating conditions because they occur in tandem with a warmer climate.

The most frightening aspect of Europe’s summer, scientists say, is that it could appear tame in retrospect. The planet is already on course to breach the central goal of the Paris Agreement of 2015: to stop the planet from heating more than two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than preindustrial levels.

Far from moderating, some experts say the pace of warming appears to be accelerating. France’s weather and climate service has painted a dystopian picture, saying that by 2050, heat waves could be five times more frequent, while temperatures could hit 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

At a cavernous exhibition center in Bordeaux, where thousands of evacuees took shelter on Sunday, that future had already arrived. Yet Céline Lartigue, 51, a social worker, had to reach into Europe’s ancient past to describe the ashes and orange sky she witnessed as she fled her house in the suburb of St.-Médard-en-Jalles, where factories manufacture the propellant for France’s nuclear missiles.

“It was like Pompeii,” she said.

Giulia Imbert contributed reporting from Paris.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, August 31, 2026 6:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Solar Has Crossed a Critical Economic Tipping Point

By Leon Stille - Aug 29, 2026, 4:00 PM CDT

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-Has-Crossed
-a-Critical-Economic-Tipping-Point.html

• Solar now requires no more upfront capital than coal or gas to produce the same annual electricity, reversing a disadvantage that was as large as five-to-one a decade ago.

• Batteries and wider grid flexibility still add real system costs, but firm solar-plus-storage is already competitive with new fossil generation in favorable markets.

• For capital-constrained emerging economies, solar no longer means paying more today to save money tomorrow. Increasingly, it is the cheaper entry ticket as well.

For years, the economic case for solar came with an awkward qualification. Yes, it had no fuel bill. Yes, its operating costs were low. And yes, over the life of a project it could already produce cheaper electricity than a new coal or gas plant. But first, someone had to pay for it.

Solar concentrated most of its lifetime costs at the beginning. Fossil power appeared to ask for less capital upfront and spread the rest of the bill across decades of coal or gas purchases. In rich countries with deep capital markets, that distinction could be managed. In emerging economies facing high interest rates, limited public budgets and competing infrastructure needs, it could determine what was built.

That disadvantage has now largely disappeared. According to a new Ember analysis, a solar plant can now require less upfront investment than a coal or gas plant for the same amount of electricity delivered. A decade ago, solar could require up to five times as much. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electric-fast-track-for-e
merging-markets/

This is not another claim that solar has become cheaper on a lifetime basis. That happened years ago. It is a more fundamental tipping point: solar is now competing with fossil fuels before the first tonne of coal or cubic meter of gas is purchased.

Fossil Power Has Lost Its Financing Shortcut

Comparisons between power technologies are often distorted by nameplate capacity. One megawatt of solar does not produce the same annual electricity as one megawatt of gas, because the sun does not shine continuously. Ember therefore compares the capital required to deliver the same quantity of electricity rather than simply matching the number printed on the generator.

That is the economically relevant comparison. In the past, solar needed considerably more installed capacity to produce the same annual output, while solar modules themselves were far more expensive. The resulting capital burden created a simple argument for fossil fuels: build the cheaper plant now and pay for fuel later.

Mass manufacturing has dismantled that argument. Solar PV's total installed cost has fallen by 87% since 2010, according to IRENA. Module production has become a vast, standardized industrial process. Efficiency has improved, supply chains have expanded and installation experience has accumulated across almost every major market.

Solar's capital profile has not changed, it still requires most expenditure upfront. The amount of capital required has.

That distinction is especially important in countries that import fossil fuels. A gas plant may look affordable on the day it is commissioned, but every megawatt-hour it generates creates another fuel purchase. Solar effectively prepays much of its energy supply for the next 25 to 30 years.

The old choice was between a capital-heavy clean asset and a cheaper fossil asset with recurring fuel costs. Increasingly, it is between two similarly priced assets, one of which arrives with a permanent fuel bill.

Much more at https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-Has-Crossed
-a-Critical-Economic-Tipping-Point.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, September 6, 2026 9:38 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

And Yet It Warms

A new edition of a manual that helps federal judges understand scientific subjects included a chapter on climate change that was withdrawn after attacks by denialists.

By Jed S. Rakoff | September 24, 2026 issue

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/09/24/and-yet-it-warms-federal-j
udges-and-climate-change/

Most federal judges have little scientific knowledge or training. They therefore often approach with some trepidation the many cases pending before them involving science, ranging from patent disputes to pharmaceutical class action suits to litigation over artificial intelligence.

To help acquaint federal judges with the basics of such subjects, the research and educational arm of the federal judiciary, the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), began publishing the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence in 1994. It includes chapters on general topics such as the scientific method and others on more specific subjects that a judge may have to confront in a given case, such as epidemiology, toxicology, neuroscience, or computer science. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, in her foreword to the most recent edition, writes, “The manual is the product of close collaboration among highly respected scientists, engineers, judges, and lawyers. It delves into the scientific subjects that judges most often face. It explains scientific approaches and explores scientific uncertainties and limits.”

No judge is required to consult the manual in any given case. It is simply a tool that is available if the judge thinks it will be useful. And because it is publicly available in print and online, the lawyers in a case can consult it as well.

In preparing new editions of the manual, the FJC has partnered since 2010 with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a private institution established by Congress in 1863 to advise the government on scientific issues. That collaboration resulted in the widely praised Third Edition of the manual, published in 2011, and the FJC asked the National Academies to prepare a Fourth Edition, which was published at the end of 2025.

To fulfill this task, the National Academies utilized the same process that had worked so well in the preparation of the Third Edition. First, a thirteen-member committee was chosen to oversee the entire project, composed of nearly equal numbers of prominent scientists and experienced judges, all of whom had been identified and approved by the FJC and the National Academies. The co-chairs were the geneticist Fred H. Gage, known for his discovery of stem cells in the adult brain, and the senior federal judge Nancy D. Freudenthal. The other scientists were of equally high stature and accomplishment, and the other judges, a mix of liberals and conservatives, had all served with distinction for many years. Virtually all the members of the committee had prior involvement with educational projects concerning the interplay of science and the law.

The Fourth Edition committee, in collaboration with senior staff from the FJC and the National Academies who had worked on previous editions of the manual, selected authors for each of the twenty chapters. Some of these authors had participated in writing chapters for the Third Edition and others were new to the project, but all had established reputations for the rigor of their work and were carefully advised as to the purposes of the manual. They drafted the initial versions of their respective chapters, which were shared with the Fourth Edition committee for its review. Comments received from the committee members were shared with the authors, who undertook revisions to their chapters.

Once the Fourth Edition committee determined that the chapters had been sufficiently revised, they were submitted to panels of outside reviewers, some fifty in all, again including prominent scientists, judges, and others chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise. Depending on whether a chapter was an update of a chapter that had appeared in the Third Edition, was significantly modified, or was entirely new, the panels consisted of two to five reviewers. Prior to the publication of the manual, the identities of the reviewers were kept secret from the authors of the chapters, so as not to interfere with their candid appraisals and suggestions.

Each reviewer was asked to answer at least five questions regarding the chapter assigned:

1. Is the content of the chapter clear and comprehensible?
2. Is the content accurate and of satisfactory quality for inclusion in the Manual?
3. Does the chapter identify the major topics and issues that would be of interest to judges?
4. Is the text written in a manner that is understandable to a non-technical audience?
5. What other suggestions for improvement, if any, do you have?

The reviewers were instructed not to answer these questions yes or no but to provide detailed written comments and suggestions, which typically occupied many pages. The reviewers of certain new chapters (including one on climate science) also had to answer questions more expressly directed to the subject matter of the chapter. The authors of each chapter were then required to respond in writing to each of the comments made by the reviewers and to submit a new version showing any changes.

A so-called monitor then carefully examined the reviewers’ comments, the authors’ responses, and the resulting changes in each chapter. In the rare instances where the reviewers and the authors substantively disagreed, the monitor had no power to decide who was right. But the monitor did have an obligation to make certain that all the reviewers’ comments and suggestions were carefully considered by the authors. Moreover, in the rare case where the authors did not agree to make a proposed change, the monitor had the power to determine whether their rationale was solid and adhered to the rigorous standards of the National Academies. For most of the chapters (including the climate science chapter), I was the monitor.

The final version of each chapter, along with the panels’ reviews and the authors’ responses, was then submitted to the Fourth Edition committee, as well as to the senior staff of the FJC and the National Academies, for their approval. The approval was unanimous.

The creation of the Fourth Edition of the manual was carried out with considerable care and thoroughness. It took several years to complete. When it was finally published at the end of 2025, both the FJC and the National Academies had every reason to be proud.

The Fourth Edition’s chapter on climate science was a long-overdue addition to the manual, as there had been substantial cases involving this complex scientific issue in the federal courts since at least the early 2000s. The chapter, written by two prominent experts from Columbia, was read by five independent reviewers, who were charged with answering, in addition to the five questions above, three additional questions:

6. Does the chapter accurately describe the certainty/uncertainty associated with the limitations of the climate models?
7. Does the chapter accurately describe the nature of current litigation involving climate science?
8. Do the authors provide appropriate caveats regarding any potential future litigation and the relevance of climate science to it?

While the reviewers’ answers to these and other questions and the authors’ written responses remain subject to the National Academies’ strict requirements of confidentiality, most of the comments and suggestions, though lengthy, were favorable, and those that raised concerns were accepted by the authors and resulted in helpful changes and clarifications in the language of the chapter, which was approved by the Fourth Edition committee.

The chapter is almost one hundred pages long and acknowledges from the outset the complexity of climate change and the difficulties of studying it. Thus any attempt to summarize its conclusions here runs the risk of oversimplification. Still, the essence is that our planet is getting progressively warmer and that, far from being an accident or solely attributable to natural variations, this is caused to a significant degree by human activity, such as emitting excessive quantities of carbon dioxide from various sources, including the combustion of oil, gas, coal, and other fossil fuels, thereby creating the so-called greenhouse effect, in which heat is trapped in the atmosphere rather than escaping into space.

Viewing climate change as scientifically controversial ignores what are now decades of studies confirming that it is occurring. Indeed, as early as 2007, a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court seem to have regarded it as scientifically likely. The Court’s decision that year in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency begins:

A well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse, trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is therefore a species—the most important species—of a “greenhouse gas.”

The purpose of the chapter on climate change is simply to confirm these mechanisms, explain how they work, and describe advances that have been made in measuring their impact.

This, however, did not deter climate change deniers from attacking the chapter almost immediately after it was published. One of the first attacks was a January 2026 article in National Review by Michael A. Fragoso, “Why Is Congress Funding the Judiciary’s Support for Climate Plaintiffs?” Fragoso is a partner at Torridon Law, a well-connected Washington firm that represents energy companies in high-stakes litigation. Arguing that the Fourth Edition’s chapter on climate science will be used to support plaintiffs in lawsuits brought against oil and other energy companies, Fragoso questions the objectivity of some of its sources. For example, he highlights that the chapter cites a finding from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the effect that it is clear that human influence has helped cause global warming, but “nowhere,” he writes, “is it mentioned that IPCC is a United Nations apparat.”

The central thrust of Fragoso’s article, however, and the place where he touches a raw nerve, relates to the funding of the FJC:

The pending House appropriations bill for Financial Services and General Government funds the FJC to the tune of $35,121,000, while the Senate bill has it at $34,929,000. This is between $700,000 and $1 million more than their prior appropriation. Do House and Senate Republicans realize that they are funding ex parte propaganda for climate-change plaintiffs? Do the appropriators?

Congressional funding for the FJC is not mixed into the general funding for the judiciary but is a separate line item. This vulnerability was not lost on several members of the House of Representatives. Seemingly in response not only to Fragoso’s article but also to a letter criticizing the chapter by the attorneys general of numerous states that depend for revenue and employment on large oil, gas, and/or coal companies, these House members complained that the climate science chapter “appears to have the underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs alleging injuries from the manufacturing, marketing, use, or sale of fossil-fuel products.”

In response, the FJC, facing a threat of reduced funding, announced in early February that it would delete the climate change chapter from the Fourth Edition of the manual, which it had not yet distributed. The FJC did not suggest that the science in the chapter was substantively wrong but rather that the “ongoing criticism of, and controversy around, the climate science chapter would detract from the Center’s ability to carry on the broad range of its valuable research and education.” This prompted a letter to the FJC in late February from various senators and representatives, all from states less dependent on fossil fuel companies, in which they stated their “strong objection to your decision to rescind critical non-partisan guidance on climate science” from the Fourth Edition and asked that the chapter be reinstated—to no avail.

This was not the end of the story. The National Academies had already made publicly available on its website the entire Fourth Edition, including the climate science chapter, and initially declined to delete it despite considerable pressure to do so from the same politicians who had put pressure on the FJC. As the then president of the National Academies, Marcia McNutt, wrote in a letter to The Wall Street Journal, the climate science chapter “was developed under rigorous procedures of the National Academies” and “is consistent with the current scientific understanding reflected in the broader peer-reviewed scientific literature.”

Although technically a nongovernmental body, the National Academies get a great deal of their revenue from government grants; for example, the largest part of the funding for preparing the Fourth Edition came from the National Science Foundation, a federal agency. And then President Trump joined the fray, writing on Truth Social that the National Academies were run by “Radical Left Dumocrats” and that taxpayers should not be funding “Climate Fraud.” On August 9 the National Academies announced that they had “determined that questions about the processes used to develop the chapter warrant an independent review, and the chapter will not appear on our website while that review is underway,” and that the review

is about the process used to produce the chapter and not about the validity of climate science. The focus is on our own procedures and whether they were adequate to ensure the highest standard of objectivity that this institution requires and our nation deserves.

The result is that neither judges nor the public has access to a detailed chapter on climate science that was developed over two years in accordance with multiple checks and balances and whose scientific validity is not at issue, at least as far as the National Academies are concerned.

Some of this is eerily reminiscent of the substantial efforts made a few decades ago by tobacco companies and their congressional supporters to minimize or deny outright the scientific evidence that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer (and is addictive as well). But it also partakes of the efforts of the past year or so not only to deny other scientifically validated conclusions but also to use the power of the purse to enforce such denialism, even when it involves a supposedly independent branch of the government—the judiciary.

In 1633 the Roman Inquisition convicted Galileo Galilei on suspicion of heresy for daring to assert that the earth was not the center of the universe but revolved around the sun. He was required to abjure his opinion but afterward was rumored to have quietly muttered, “And yet it moves.” We may try to deny that human activity is a major cause of the rapid warming of our planet, which has already begun to show signs of looming catastrophe. And yet it warms.

The Climate Science reference they don’t want Judges to read
https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2026/02/the-climate-sci
ence-reference-they-dont-want-judges-to-read/

Reference Guide on Climate Science
https://www.realclimate.org/wp-content/uploads/Reference_Guide_on_Clim
ate_Science_RMSE_4th_Ed.pdf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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