Mappy Holiday Ornaments!

Fun little mappy holiday ornaments!

• The Spiral Globe
• More Ornaments!

All Of Human History In One Hour

Got an hour? Great!

USA Surficial Geology

Verty cool new map from the USGS: Cooperative National Geologic Map: Earth's Surface geology (ArcGIS Online). Or, get it from the USGS.

Losing the Climate Info Wars?

Good stuff here: Losing the Climate Info Wars?

"The strategy is not subtle, a recent study found. Climate skeptics present their position as “projecting rationality, authority, and masculine self-control” while those who acknowledge global warming “are depicted through emotionally charged, feminized, and irrational imagery,” and labeled “alarmists” who propose radical solutions.

Political campaigns deploy the same playbook. Republicans frequently claimed the Biden administration was trying to “emasculate” American drivers by forcing them into electric vehicles. Lee Zeldin, Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, has labeled climate change a “religion” instead of what it is: a matter of physics.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said that Mr. Trump was pursuing “energy addition, not energy transition.”

“The President has set a strong example for the rest of the world by reversing course on the Green Energy Scam and unleashing our natural resources, like beautiful, clean coal and natural gas, to strengthen our grid stability and lower energy costs,” she said, citing arguments that many economists dispute."

Elizabeth Kolbert & John Stewart

Always worth a watch & read!

Glaciers in the Andes

Here are two excellent videos about glacier recession & disappearance in the Andes:

No More GDP!

Great article in Nature by Constanza et al.: Beyond growth — why we need to agree on an alternative to GDP now

Here's the summary: GDP was never designed as a metric for human well-being. It kind of worked as a proxy for that for a couple of decades after WWII, but no more. Using GDP assumes substitutability between labor, technology, and natural resources in the context of production. But this obviously ignores ecological limits or planetary boundaries, or, in other words: it decouples economic activity from natural resource use.

We need instead to adopt a universal goal: sustainabilty & inclusive well-being. Not sure why inclusive well-being is separated from sustainabilty here, but ok. The question then is how do we a) measure that and b) how do we aggreate our metrics into some kind of index or proxy? Here are some of the metrics: Well-being components: these 19 core factors are common to most beyond-GDP indicators.

Human

• Life satisfaction
• Health
• Life expectancy at birth
• Education

Social

• Crime
• Civic engagement
• Governance
• Income equality
• Gender equality

Built

• Housing
• Infrastructure
• Financial security
• Employment
• Per capita consumption
• Business health

Natural

• Natural capital
• Water quality
• Air quality
• Greenhouse-gas emissions

Sounds a lot like donut economics to me!