Category: Global Change

On Helloween (!) 2008 (!!), I published a lonesome post on my then wordpress-hosted blog. With that, I created #FLOGW and #FLGW. The world looks different today – or not.

Feilner’s Law of Global Warning states:

“I believe that the climatic change driven by the green house effect will become faster and faster as we watch. Analog to Moore’s Law in processor technology, the measured climatic change will always happen faster than the most skeptical experts of the previous years had suspected. That’s my rule of climatic change, Feilner’s Law of Global Warming (FLGW).”

Here’s my collection.

#UHC2030 – Global Universal Healthcare by 2030 – with 4% of the nation’s spendings

It’s possible, and we are getting closer: 

“The Financing Alliance for Health (FAH) is a partnership that includes GlaxoSmithKline, the World Bank and Rockefeller Foundation. It helps governments design and fund affordable and at-scale primary health systems and has developed a Community Health Financing Compendium that brings together different ways of funding UHC. One of the alliance’s key arguments is that “traditional donor support” is no longer enough to build strong health systems, but instead this type of investment should be a catalyst to bring in private and public resources and develop new partnerships.”

Why it makes financial sense to achieve global universal healthcare by 2030 | Global health progress | The Guardian

“Want to know what climate change will do in your backyard? There’s a dataset for that”

Pinpointing climate impacts

Climate-change projections are typically available at coarse scales, ranging 70-400km. But models for the impact of for many agricultural plant varieties require data at finer scales. The researchers used techniques to increase the (a process known as downscaling) and to correct errors (a process known as bias correction) to create high-resolution future climate data for 436 scenarios.

“This is a critical resource for modeling more realistically the future of crops and ecosystems,” said Carlos Navarro, the lead author of the study who is affiliated with CIAT and CCAFS.

https://m.phys.org/news/2020-01-climate-backyard-dataset.html

Bill Gates: “Die Welt wird immer besser” – und nach Trump “kommt die Wahrheit zurück”!

Bill Gates macht eine erstaunliche Vorhersage zur Ära Trump – Business Insider

„Diese Ereignisse – so schlimm sie auch waren – sind im Kontext eines größeren, positiven Trends geschehen“, schreibt Gates. „Insgesamt wird die Welt besser.“ 

Einige der Punkte, die er als Beispiele aufzählt, sind:

  • Ein drastischer Rückgang der Sterblichkeitsrate von Kindern unter fünf Jahren. Seit 1990 hat sich die Zahl halbiert und hat 122 Millionen Kindern das Leben gerettet.
  • Ein dramatischer Wandel bei der Bevölkerungszahl, die in extremer Armut lebt. Ware es im Jahr 1990 noch ein Drittel der Weltbevölkerung, ist es heute nur noch ein Zehntel. 
  • Ein enormer Anstieg der Anzahl der Kinder, die weltweit eine Schule besuchen: Mittlerweile können das 90 Prozent aller Kinder. 
  • Gesetze, die Homosexuelle schützen, sind nun in mehr als 100 Ländern in Kraft. Weltweit werden Frauen zunehmend in öffentlichen Ämtern besetzt.

Old milk is dead, new milk is nuts. #Murica

Reality update: America’s Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt | Food & Wine … :

“Maybe this isn’t a bad time to start exploring plant-based milks, as Elmhurst Dairy did. The 80-year-old milk producer closed its Queens, New York facility in the summer of 2016, and then reopened less than a year later after switching its focus from cow’s milk to what it calls “milked” nuts. The company is now known as Elmhurst Milked, and it sells a variety of plant- and nut-based milks, including plain and flavored oat milk, hemp creamers, and almond, cashew, hazelnut, and walnut milks.“

#australiaburning as a role model to learn from

Reality update: Falling ash, skies of blood – and now Australia’s anger smoulders | Australia news | The Guardian … :

“The past week has been marked by the refusal of public officials, including PM Scott Morrison, to recognise the scale of the crisis”

Look at it, closely. The #pyrocene is coming to your home, too, soon. Come closer, look at what’s happening in Australia now, after the fire. It’s already starting. Remember Katrina? What happened after the hurricane? I hope we don’t see that in Australia, but we will eventually see such uproar and stuff more and more. Honestly, I don’t see any way of avoiding it, no politicalopportunity to stop it. Not anymore. Wired puts it like this:

“If you want to gaze into the hellish future of human existence on Earth, look to Australia. Huge bushfires have torched 14.5 million acres since September, killing at least 18. Vast plumes of smoke are pouring into major cities along the east coast, imposing a dire respiratory health hazard on millions of people. And Australia’s fire season is just getting started.

For Californians, the scenes are familiar. The same cabal of factors, including climate change and land management, is conspiring to produce bigger wildfires that consume more land and kill more people. We have entered the age of embers—think of it like an ice age, but with flames, what fire historian Stephen Pyne calls the Pyrocene.”

(https://www.wired.com/story/australia-is-blazing-into-the-pyrocene-the-age-of-fire/)