It's hard to stay hopeful, tbh.

🔗 https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/climate-nears-point-no-return-land-sea-temperatures-break-records-experts-2023-06-30/

"We've run out of time because change takes time." Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, University of New South Wales)

Other quotes:

"Parts of North America were some 10C above the #seasonal #average this month..."

"Though mean #temperatures had temporarily breached the 1.5C threshold before, this was the first time they had done so in the #northern #hemisphere #summer..."

Is it just me who finds the #OrdnanceSurvey #map #symbols for #SolarFarms dissatisfactory? Not only are they too literal and insufficiently simplified (note #church symbols)—I’d suggest a stylised #sun alone would suffice—but what really gets my goat is the symbols’ orientation, which implies that the sun shines from the north-west quarter of the #sky (which in the #Northern #Hemisphere it NEVER DOES!). #Saturday #morning #rant over! #BadDesign #Cartography #Maps #Symbology

🇵🇱
Nic specjalnego, łąki, chmury, drzewo, pobocze drogi. Lecz właśnie w tym momencie przekraczmy południk 0°.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
Nothing special, meadow, clouds, tree, roadside but at this point we cross 0° meridian.

#hemisphere
#zeroLongitude
#LatLon

"Many #glaciers in #Antarctica are never entirely free of snow, even after summers end in the southern #hemisphere. Yet this season, abnormally warm temperatures have melted several snowy regions in the peninsula, the arm of Antarctica protruding toward South America, to their bare ground. It’s the second year in a row with an above-average melt season in the peninsula — an area #heating up five times faster than the global average — and it’s fueling concern among researchers."

#ClimateChange #Icecaps

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/24/antarctica-peninsula-glaciers-snow-melt-warm-temperatures/

@dredmorbius @AZL Anyone know the difference between #Hemisphere & project #Fairview? #askFedi

#CorpusCallosum Found to Switch off Right #Hemisphere During #Speech
https://neurosciencenews.com/corpus-callosum-language-lateralization-22256
#biology #Neurology #science #brain #communication

Corpus callosum found to switch off right #hemisphere during #speech https://iq.hse.ru/en/news/807417393.html #neuroscience

@dgar
In that circumstance you need to be careful of #ashtags, especially in the #northern #hemisphere #currently, since they seem to have #power problems as well.

Today is the penultimate full day of #summer in the #northern #hemisphere if, like the majority of the population on the planet, you live in or east of #Europe or #Africa. The #equinox will occur a little after 02:00Z on Friday 23 September. With today’s #sunset, I present two #photographs but each both in #BlackAndWhite and #colour.

#MyWork #MyPhoto #CCBYSA #DSLR #Nikon #D7000

As it’s the eve of the #SummerSolstice here, and everywhere else in this #hemisphere, the #Sun will set at virtually its most #northerly bearing on the #western #horizon. I waited for the #Sun actually to disappear and leave its glowing halo.

#MyWork #MyPhoto #CCBYSA #DSLR #Nikon #D7000 #Spring

[🔁]

@JohnJClimateMarcher 🔗 https://mastodon.social/users/JohnJClimateMarcher/statuses/107355438155177803
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@JonathanMBR

Yes, a proportion of the Earth's #biomass has been exclusively usurped by #humans.
I believe that native #herders are much less to blame than the industrialized #CAFO operations in the northern #hemisphere, however.

US Domestic Surveillance Disclosures pre-dating Edward Snowden's Revelations

Asking for sources of any current activities met with some resistance at HN. Challenged for any awareness of pre-Snowden programmes, I listed a few I was aware of, off the top of my head:

Regards pre-Snowden, the situation was far more than an "open secret", there were multiple documented projects and methods employed. Among them:

• 2013: Hemisphere, an AT&T call records database dating to the 1980s accessible by the US DEA. (This was publicised near-simultaneously with Snowden's own 2013 disclosures.) https://www.eff.org/cases/hemisphere

• 2006: Mark Klein and the Room 641A revelations concerning AT&T's beam splitters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

• 2005, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe, NSA whistleblower, warrantless surveillance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_official)

• 2004, Russell Tice, NSA surveillance including of congressional members. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/01/why-nsa-whistle-blower-russ-tice-may-be-right.html

There were very strong suspicions around the TIA (total information awareness) and USA PATRIOT ACT (2003, 2001). I recall much chatter about this at the time, and the related FISA court, though little by way of specific details of technological measures and methods involved.

Carnivore, a WinNT workstation-based tool, disclosed ~2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)

There are telephnic data retention programmes, including MAINWAY (revealed in 2006), containing an estimated over 1.9 trillion call-detail records, and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAINWAY

Project ECHELON, with disclosures of varying aspects from 1972 -- 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

There are earlier periods, notably addressed by the FBI's own COINTELPRO archives (https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro), though for my purposes I'm considering "modern" projects to be circa 1990 onwards. (COINTELPRO and the Church Committee hearings resulted in substantial changes, at least publically, to US domestic surveillance).

And I've compiled a long list of pre-1990 references of concerns regarding significant technologists who'd warned of the risks of information technology as a tool of surveillance and control, largely as no such list seemed extant: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105074933053020193

I'm well aware that documentation of clandestine and national security issues is difficult to come by, see the TK case for one reason why that is.

But that's also why specific documentation is so valuable and why I'd requested that.

(Adapted from an HN comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184956 )

#surveillance #SurveillanceState #SurveillanceCapitalism #NSA #CIA #FBI #Carnivore #ECHELON #PatriotAct #FISA #MAINWAY #Room614A #ATT #MarkKlein #WilliamBinney #RussellTice #Hemisphere #EdwardSnowden #COINTELPRO #ChurchCommittee

Some of you may have noted me posting #photographs of the #Moon in its various #phases. In slight variation to that series, here is the #FirstQuarter in #DayTime (I already have a decent night-time image of this phase). It’s still in the #eastern #hemisphere and it’s an almost #cloudless #day.

#MyWork #MyPhoto #CCBYSA #DSLR #Nikon #D7000 #BackyardAstronomy #AmateurAstronomy #Quarter

It’s the first day of #autumn in the #northern #hemisphere today as per the convention that it is when the #Sun actually rises in the #east and sets in the #west and the nights are going to get longer now for a while.

#Heatwaves amplify near-record levels of ice melt in #northern #hemisphere | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/02/heatwaves-amplify-near-record-levels-of-ice-melt-in-northern-hemisphere

#GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #Greenland

It’s the #December #Solstice, strictly at 22:23 UTC today, when the #Sun begins its #celestial journey back #north. Have a nice #winter if you share this #hemisphere.