All posts tagged: large scale

Climate Change Could Save the Rust Belt

Climate Change Could Save the Rust Belt

Published by Sam

As my airplane flew low over the flatlands of western Michigan on a dreary December afternoon, sunbursts splintered the soot-toned clouds and made mirrors out of the flooded fields below. There was plenty of rain in this part of the Rust Belt—sometimes too much. Past the endless acres, I could make out the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, then soon, in the other direction, the Detroit River, Lakes Huron and Erie, and southern Canada. In a world running short on fresh water in its lakes and rivers, more than 20 percent of that water was right here. From a climate standpoint, there couldn’t be a safer place in the country—no hurricanes, no sea-level rise, not much risk of wildfires. That explains why models suggest many more people will soon arrive here. My destination was the working-class city of Ypsilanti, and a meeting with Beth Gibbons, an urban planner and specialist in climate adaptation. Gibbons served as the founding executive director of a planning consortium called the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP), which was formed …

Benjamin Netanyahu Must Go – The Atlantic

Benjamin Netanyahu Must Go – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

When a nation suffers a surprise attack, the most obvious costs are the sheer loss of life and the immediate damage to national security. But another casualty can be the nation’s underlying strategic assumptions about the world it inhabits. This happened to the United States on 9/11, when terrorism went from a third-tier annoyance to the foremost security challenge the U.S. faced, and a new and little-known enemy emerged as its primary foe. In Israel, the attacks of October 7 have had a similarly devastating effect, destroying the nation’s sense that its territory was reasonably safe from a large-scale Palestinian attack and that the lack of a political settlement with the Palestinians was manageable for the indefinite future—that is, without a solution involving either two states or one binational state. The idea that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could provide security while kicking the Palestinian problem into the indefinite future, which he has been making state policy for nearly three decades, has lost all credibility. The question for Israelis is what will fill the void left …

Did Humans Ever Live in Peace?

Did Humans Ever Live in Peace?

Published by skeptic

For millions of years, the river Ebro has sloshed south from Spain’s jagged Cantabrian Mountains, carving out a broad valley that is now home to one of the country’s most fertile wine regions. Between its sprawling vineyards, the landscape rises steeply to hilltop medieval towns. Laguardia is the best known, on account of its high walls, cobblestones, and cavernous wine cellars. But the town’s rustic grandeur conceals a deep history of violence. More than 2,000 years ago, Celtic tribes fought a decades-long series of wars in this region, part of a brutal last stand against the invading Romans—and for Laguardia, even those conflicts were of relatively recent vintage. Some years ago, just outside the town walls, workmen at a construction site were operating a bulldozer when one of them spotted bones sticking up through the disturbed earth. Archaeologists were dispatched to the scene. Careful brushwork revealed not one human skeleton but 90, along with pieces of more than 200 others, all dated to a little more than 5,000 years ago. A new analysis of the …

Iran Isn’t Pulling Hamas’s Strings

Iran Isn’t Pulling Hamas’s Strings

Published by skeptic

The past week in Israel and the Palestinian territories has been horrific, and the next few weeks promise only more misery and pain. Every shooting war is also a war between competing narratives—each side has its preferred way of framing the conflict—and few have been as fiercely contested in this regard as the war between Israel and the Palestinians. A week in, we should pause to interrogate some of what we have heard combatants and pundits say. Hamas is ISIS. In the aftermath of the attacks on Israel, which included atrocities such as the murder of children and the elderly, Israel and its defenders have likened Hamas to the Islamic State, the violent Islamist movement that briefly took over large swaths of Iraq and Syria before its defeat by local forces. The comparison is at once understandable and misguided. I served as the senior Pentagon official responsible for the Middle East when we created the campaign plan that eventually defeated ISIS, and I remember the reporting—both open-source and classified—that clearly outlined the group’s ruthless nature. …

A Simple Solution for Keeping Microplastics Out of the Water Supply

A Simple Solution for Keeping Microplastics Out of the Water Supply

Published by skeptic

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine. Sponges. Is there anything they can’t do? For millennia, humans have used dried natural sponges to clean up, to paint, and as vessels for drinking; we’ve even used them as contraceptive devices. Whether synthetic or natural, sponges are great at ensnaring tiny particles in their many pores. And as scientists around the world are beginning to show, sponges’ cavity-filled forms could provide a solution to one of our era’s biggest scourges: microplastic pollution. In August, researchers in China published a study describing their development of a synthetic sponge that makes short work of microscopic plastic debris. In tests, the researchers show that when a specially prepared plastic-filled solution is pushed through one of their sponges, the sponge can remove both microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics from the liquid. These particles typically become trapped in the sponge’s pores. Though the sponges’ effectiveness varied in experiments, in part depending on the concentration of plastic and the acidity and saltiness of the liquid, optimal conditions allowed the researchers to remove …