Climate Crisis Causing Earthquakes

rp-online.de

Simone Peter, a member of the German Greens party

 and an elected member of government for over nine

 years and currently a lobbyist, says that climate

 change has been the cause of earthquakes, including

 the recent disasters in south Asia. 

According to German media Apollo News: " Since 2018, the

 former Green Party leader has served as president of 

the German Renewable Energy Association (BEE). Her 

goal, she explained at the time, is to use this approach

 to initiate a comprehensive transformation of the

 economy and society."

The James Webb Telescope Again

The James Webb Infrared Telescope gets almost as much

 media coverage as Donald Trump. The difference is that the

 orbiting telescope is supposedly telling us about things that

 happened millions of years ago and millions of light years

 away while the Trump narrative has immediate complications

 for everyone. 

Spending millions in taxpayer funding to acquire information

 that is of no possible use to any living human while neglecting

 the mundane condition of heavily traveled highways, underfed

 and diseased humans, world-wide migration and impending

 warfare smacks more of religion than science.

This is distributing the wealth of the mass of the uninterested

 for the benefit of a small portion of academia and the

 information that astronomers gain doesn't do them any good

 either. 

According to NASA the four goals of the Webb Infrared 

Telescope are to 1. search for light from the first stars and

 galaxies that formed in the universe after the Big Bang, 2.

 study galaxy formation and evolution, 3. understand star

 formation and planet formation, 4. study planetary systems

 and the origins of life.

Even if the telescope could acquire accurate information about

 the light from the first stars, galaxy formation, star and planet

 formation and planetary systems and the origins of life, this

 information can be of no practical use to anyone, including the

astronomers involved. The information can't be used to make 

decisions other than funding for more expensive and

 meaningless deep space investigation. While private parties 

should be free to indulge in this kind of science it's very wrong 

to use public money, extracted by force from the non-academic

portion of society, to finance it.

 

  

Nobody Goes To Jail

For 11 years after 2005 Wachovia Bank and the Seminole nation of Florida had an agreement that the bank would manage an investment portfolio meant to assure funding for a program set up to benefit Seminole youth. The bank was purchased by Wells Fargo but dissatisfaction with returns and high management costs lead to cancellation of the agreement in 2016.

Finally, on March 25, after 6 hours of deliberation, a jury awarded the Seminoles $832 million in damages for mismanagement of the trust and $7million in compensation for fees collected. Eight bank officials were also sued by name, but the jury ordered them to pay only token damages of $50 to $500 each.

Anywhere but in the hyper-capitalist West these eight would be safely behind bars, as an example of what stealing millions for your employer can be the result. Instead they will probably remain at their posts or move along to similar positions. It's little wonder that Wells Fargo has a terrible reputation among banks. 

Of course with an award of this magnitude Wells Fargo has no choice but to appeal the verdict. This case will probably simmer along until all the adults, both plaintiffs and defendants, have moved along to the happy hunting grounds.

 

 

World Day For Glaciers

Yesterday, the Vernal Equinox, was also World Day For Glaciers, as decided by the UN General Assembly in 2022. It is celebrated to promote the world conservation of glaciers, a critical source of drinking water.

Glaciers don't normally vary much in extent unless there are changes in climate and they seem to be shrinking now because of global warming induced by human activities. According to Sulagna Mishra of the World Meteorological Organization, by the end of the century glaciers may have disappeared.

  

researchgate.net 

Sulagna Mishra

Michael Zemp of the World Glacier Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich says that glaciers have lost 9 trillion tons of mass since 1975. 

wgms.ch

Michael Zemp

The Glacier of the Year for 2025 is the South Cascade Glacier in Washington state, USA, continuously monitored since 1952.

The European country with the most glaciers is Switzerland and Glacier Monitoring Switzerland maintains that if the global temperature rises more than 2 C survival of their glaciers is unlikely. 

German Insanity

The German Greens, noted for dismissing reality, will be raptly watching the destruction of the two boiler units of the Hamburg/Moorburg coal-fired power house this coming Saturday. A 3 billion Euro project that came on-line in 2015, the idea of efficient, relatively clean, electricity was so repellent to the likes of Federal Minister of Economics Robert Habeck and Hamburg's Senator for the Environment Jens Kerstan that it was only allowed to produce power until 2021 and has been inoperative since. Demolition of one of the countries newest and most efficient hard coal plants began soon after.

 dreamstime.com 

The plant was able to supply most of power required for the Hamburg area but its presence was a constant source of irritation to German environmental NGOs who were financed with taxpayer funds.

All is not lost however. While the boilers are no longer providing the steam to spin generators, the plant is being reconfigured into a hydrogen electrolyzer that will be in operation by 2027 to produce truly clean electricity.    

The Scary Chinese Navy

It's the business of the on-line Asia Times to make one worry, basically about China. It's also a general topic of conversation among US government officials. For some reason the status and future of the PLA Navy is giving them nightmares. The reason is that the Chinese have committed to building a large and effective navy and the US is either unwilling or unable to respond in kind.

 

Photo Reuters/Bobby Yip

 The first Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning, as described by International Business Times.

It isn't that the US is impoverished or lacks the expertise to weld together the components of navy or commercial vessels. The Yankees are more committed to assembling fields of solar panels shipped from China, installing phalanxes of wind turbines offshore and in farm fields, sequestering liquid carbon dioxide in rural North Dakota and trying to convince everyone to buy an EV . China is actually doing most of the same things, but how?

Uncle Sam, with a defense budget that's bigger than the rest of the world combined, can't seem to put together a believable audit of the Pentagon and has a total budget shortfall in the trillions.

Why should Americans worry about a bigger Chinese navy anyway? The Chinese ships mostly sail around in the waters adjacent, never seen off Miami or Malibu. If they actually did present some kind of a threat to the US mainland or anywhere else couldn't the vaunted US navy easily fend them off with the effective and expensive weaponry at their disposal? 

Time marches on and commentators say that the US navy is outdated and obsolete. Won't that also be the case with that of the Chinese in a few years if the US can somehow resist the temptation of trying to blow them up?    

Artificial Ignorance

The Tow Center For Digital Journalism, part of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and, as they say, "where technology and journalism meet, and where education and practice meet" has done a study of eight AI models, the results of which show them to be wrong, or gave incorrect answers, about 60% of the time. The chat bot Grok 3 was wrong 94% of the time.