Call Them Out!

Posted on May 24, 2013 by mrchumpy

People are always asking about small/easy things they can do to help with climate change…well, it doesn’t get easier than this, time to step up.

Call out climate deniers in Congress!

If you have a Twitter account, follow the link above to send Tweets to climate deniers in Congress. We’re going to flood them with responses today and let them know what their constituents think. It took me about 10 minutes to Tweet everyone on the list, and I added a small moral touch to each by saying “Please, help us leave a world worth inheriting”. The only exception was Paul Ryan, for whom I substituted “Ayn Rand is for selfish, immature douchebags.”  :)

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This is the future. Make of it what you will.

Posted on May 23, 2013 by mrchumpy

 

The world is changing.

We are a global community, a collective Hive Mind. We share ideas, beliefs and together become more than the individual.

We live in a time where the voice of one can be heard by the ears of millions.

This comment alone can be seen across the globe and be shown to others through social media in seconds.

This is a power beyond anything in history. This is the power of humanity, at its worst and best and we are all a part of it.

This is the future.

Make of it what you will.

- YouTube user UnhappyVoortsy, commenting on TBP:AFK

 

This may come as a shock, but right now you’re on the internet, looking at a website. The content of this site is something I created, and through cheap and efficient means have been able to share with the entire world (and by entire world, I mean my Mom and a handful of people who like to mix their science and cat memes). Billions of other people are doing the same thing right now for every conceivable subject — at the speed of light, 24 hours a day, the internet enriches humanity through the free exchange of ideas.

BitTorrent plays a huge part in this. If you don’t know about file sharing and BitTorrent specifially, let me bottom line it for you: everything is now free. Movies, games, albums, books…anything that can be represented in digital form can be easily duplicated and shared using Bittorrent. The service is peer-to-peer (meaning transactions happen between individuals, not a central server) and at any given moment it has more active users than YouTube and Facebook combined! Those users dominate upstream bandwidth, and gobble up a huge slice of internet traffic overall.

Data collected by Canadian broadband company Sandvine

Continue reading →

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I can’t believe he uttered that many words without profanity

Posted on May 22, 2013 by mrchumpy

 

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The Greatest Speech Ever Made

Posted on May 15, 2013 by mrchumpy

The years ahead will test men’s souls. As climate change takes root and we reach the limits of economic growth, we will feel stress and may think to take from others to maintain ourselves. But this is not our true nature, and it is not the way things need be. Our actions are merely products of our social constructs and values, things which we ourselves created, things we can change any time we like.

Here, Charlie Chaplin reminds us of this. I think I’ve got something in my eye…

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Big Round Numbers

Posted on May 13, 2013 by mrchumpy

Last week, the world passed a milestone:  the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere passed 400 parts per million. This is the most we’ve had in the atmosphere in all of human history, and it’s more than the planet has seen in several million years.

 Ice core data before 1958, Mauna Loa data after 1958

 

But 400 ppm is just a number, right?  What does it mean? Let’s paint a picture, shall we?

  • C02 and global temperature

    (click to enlarge)

    Because of the greenhouse effect, global temperature and atmospheric carbon content always move in near lockstep. (see chart)

 

If any of this scares you, welcome to my world, as the saying goes. If you’re scared, that’s a good thing, it means you understand the scale of the problem and are having a natural human response. By no means is our situation hopeless…this problem has a solution. But nothing’s going to happen unless you take that terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach and do something with it.

 

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Our Hourglass

Posted on May 11, 2013 by mrchumpy

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Sister Sites

Posted on May 9, 2013 by mrchumpy

The Transition Voice version added this little beauty…

Readership of this blog is still pretty small, so to get some additional exposure I’ve taken to pitching articles to larger sites. As a result, this week our friends over at Transition Voice and Resilience.org both picked up the article on Republicans and climate change. Each site edited and sourced images for the article a little differently, which I found interesting.

Go check out the articles to see how professional editing can improve a raw piece, and while you’re there peruse everything else because both are great sites full of really important and well-crafted content.

 

Transition Voice version

Resilience version

 

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Sweatpant Science

Posted on May 6, 2013 by mrchumpy

boinc

Ever wanted to be a scientist, but were too lazy to change out of your sweatpants and get a degree in molecular biology?  ME TOO. That’s what makes BOINC so cool.

The Berkely Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open source platform for scientific discovery that utilizes distributed computing. In layman’s terms, it’s a special screensaver that lets your machine process scientific data when you’re not using it. The projects your machine tackles are completely up to you…there’s quite a long list to choose from. I’m a big fan of climate modeling and analyzing radio telescope data for evidence of extraterrestrial life, but maybe your thing is decoding the human genome, quantum chemistry, or artificial intelligence.

The best part is that any laziness is now justifiable, so long as your screensaver is on! When Mom calls and wants to know what you’re up to, you can casually toss off ”oh, just doing some light number crunching on the Jet Stream effect”, even though you’re wolfing down nachos and watching Dancing With the Stars.

What it actually looks like:

boinc2

rosettaathome

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Climate Change: Republican Renaissance?

Posted on May 2, 2013 by mrchumpy

The Republicans are a party in crisis. Having lost the election, they’re now wracked with internal strife and prospects for a turnaround in the near term appear dim. The reasons for this decline are primarily demographic: their values, platform, and policies are now dangerously out of sync with the mainstream, and diverging further every year. Exploring this divergence could fill an article of its own, but it’s best summed up by the Republican party’s recent “autopsy” of their 2012 election failures which concluded the party is simply “too old, too white.”

Have they considered cloning?

Faced with these demographic challenges, Republicans understandably fear they’ll be marginalized and irrelevant within a generation. They’re in need of a renaissance, a new narrative that draws attention away from their current controversies over “legitimate rape”, and funding cuts for social programs. Building this narrative requires a bridge issue, one that appeals to broad new audiences without compromising the party’s core values.

That issue is climate change.

Continue reading →

Posted in Article, Commentary, Politics | 3 Comments

The vastness of the universe!…

Posted on May 1, 2013 by mrchumpy

…and some sound personal advice.  (courtesy of Reddit)

wjkio2

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