Agnes Török - 'Worthless'

[Youtube] "Poem by Agnes Török on the news of a new Conservative budget. Based on experiences of living in Britain under austerity as a young, queer, unemployed, female immigrant student - and not taking it any more. More info on: www.agnestorok.org "

Feminist Philosophy Quarterly

The Feminist Philosophy Quarterly launches today. Free pdf downloads of articles available.

The Stickiness of the Fossil Fuel Age

Interesting piece on the distortion of carbon dating caused by the fossil fuel age here. It seems like Tim Morton's analysis of global warming as a hyperobject, perhaps most notably its trait of viscosity, could be applied to this in an illuminating manner.

[Climate Progress] Those concerned with climate change spend a lot of time arguing that it’s not just an environmental problem, but also an economic, human rights, national security, and even mental health issue. Now a new study has found that greenhouse gas emissions could impact a range of unlikely fields due to their effect on radiocarbon dating, a much-heralded scientific method used to determine the age of objects containing organic material.

The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that emissions from fossil fuels are artificially raising the carbon age of the atmosphere, which makes objects today seem much older than they are when scrutinized by a radiocarbon dater. This change in the ability to date objects could impact measurements commonly taken in a broad range of endeavors, including archaeology, forgery detection, forensics, earth science, and physiology.

For instance, the study suggests that by 2050 — just 35 years from now — new clothes could have the same radiocarbon date as something worn during the Battle of Hastings in 1066. [MORE HERE]

Harvard Study on Bee Colony Collapse

[CS Globe] "One area we are waking up to is the massive amount of pesticides we spray (especially in North America) on our food that has not only been linked to human disease, but a massive die off in the global bee population within the past few years.

A new study out of Harvard University, published in the June edition of the Bulletin of Insectology puts the nail in the coffin, neonicotinoids are killing bees at an exponential rate, they are the direct cause of the phenomenon labeled as colony collapse disorder (CCD).

Neonicotinoid’s are the world’s most widely used insecticides." [READ MORE]

Vernichtungsschlacht

Well, the Greek bailout is being described by many and is trending on social media as a coup (♯ThisIsACoup), but I'm not sure if even that goes far enough. Krugman's initial comment on the deal, that 'this goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief', seems to capture the direction of my own thinking. I accept that the Greek "choice" has often looked like one between 'starvation and slavery' as events have intensified over the last few weeks. But this now looks like a decisive victory for the Troika and Eurozone-instantiated monsters of finance and neoliberalisation, an economic vernichtungsschlacht. Time to revisit Graeber and the moralisation of debt.

The Depressive Realism of Climate Scientists

If you can tolerate the ads, there is an excellent and pleasingly quite long article in Esquire exploring the attitudes and darker reflections of many leading climate scientists and activists. I found the response of the more moderate/hopeful scientist, Gavin Schmidt, the most personally provocative:

"Bad things are going to happen. What can you do as a person? You write stories. I do science. You don't run around saying we're fucked! We're fucked!  We're fucked!' It doesn't - it doesn't incentivize anybody to do anything."

Schmidt was responding here to the glaciologist Jason Box's now infamous July 29th 2014 tweet, "If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd." Unfortunately, on the question of how to incentivize people (a horrible term), it seems that the routes to human inaction and indifference with regard to global warming are many and varied. Not talking about it doesn't incentivize people, the facts don't incentivize most people, neither does the well-trodden path of presenting/peddling a hopeful or optimistic message incentivize people. The aesthetico-political, psychological and affective cocktail of forces needed to generate any significant response to the unfolding climatic catastrophe is likely to be more complex, and need to draw upon some fairly exotic pragmatic strategies, in order to meaningfully impact the systemic inertia of Business As Usual. Frankly, I consider a (large) number of well-informed and otherwise quietly reflective individuals shouting "we're fucked" to be a rather potent ingredient in any such cocktail.