My friend got one of those and it’s neat but for the the life of me I couldn’t figure out how you clean it.
mono
5498
You rinse it out, and it comes with a long rubber squeegee cord. You pull it through the straw a couple of times. Works well, and the case has an inset drying basket so you can let it air dry after the rinse and squeegee.
How about between the rubber and the metal?
mono
5500
Well, yeah that’s tough to do anything w but rinse. However it’s only exposed when the straw is broken down. When the straw is in your drink the metal joints are sealed so your drink doesn’t have the opportunity to find a way in there.
here in Germany, we have a increasingly growing right-wing party at around 10-15% … they are nazis-lite alt-right not only in my view. And of course they are deniers of man-made climate change. How comes that the right-wings all over the world are progagating climate change denial? Where comes this ideology from? Fighting climate change (man-made) is not a liberal/leftist/socialist thing, it should be universal. Do those right-wingers have a plan B? Like a bunker for the rich white people?
Maybe it is just general stupidity/igonrance on the right-wing, how could anyone expect right-wingers to have any humany decency?
At least in the US, the right wing is the territory of the wealthy and corporations. They don’t want climate change regulations getting in the way of their profits, and they don’t want to pay higher taxes to fund mitigation efforts. So they deliberately sow doubt and denial about climate change, and it becomes part of general right wing ideology.
MikeJ
5505
As Scott said, but I would add that if you are the right-wing type that figures the market will solve everything, you don’t want to acknowledge a problem that requires government intervention of some sort to fix the market failure. The atmosphere is very inconvenient in that it doesn’t respect property rights.
If you are the nationalist sort of right-winger, a problem that requires nations to work together and abide by international treaties is also something that it is very inconvenient to consider. The atmosphere doesn’t respect international borders! Why, if you started thinking about how those international treaties should be written, you might have to start thinking about the well being and interests of different-looking people in far-away countries!
In fact, this whole thing is probably a hoax by the left wing designed to provide an excuse for world government and open borders!
(Edit: Think about resistance on certain parts of the left wing that capitalism has significant upsides)
Of course there should be a climate debate and of course there should be a cabinet-level position dedicated to combating climate change and of course there should be more money, press, and political capital spent on solving this problem than were spent on the Apollo program we are all getting misty-eyed about as it approaches its 50th.
But our species is encountering one of the filters, and so far not doing great.
Tman
5508
Fascinating nearly 40 year study showing huge declines in insect populations with corresponding drops in bird populations.
MikeJ
5509
Another in a set of studies that confuses me:
The IPCC report concluded that the economic impact of a two-degree rise in global temperature could be as much as $69 trillion US, and even limiting the rise to 1.5 degrees would come with a $54-trillion price tag.
Moody’s then looked at all those factors, and tried to come up with the likely economic impact based on how bad things get. One scenario assumes the global temperature rises by one degree in the next century. A second assumes an increase of 1.9 degrees. A third assumes a 2.4-degree rise, while the most dire scenario assumes a 4.1-degree average increase.
The forecast for the U.S. is a bit of a wash, as the most optimistic temperature increase would hurt the U.S. economy to the tune of 0.9 per cent, while the most dire would see a 0.8 per cent expansion. “But it would be too simplistic to say that climate change does not hurt the U.S.,” Moody’s said, noting that some parts of the country would be badly hurt by disasters and rising sea levels, whereas others would benefit.
I seriously don’t know what to make of this sort of thing. 4.1 degrees average increase and they think it would actually have a net positive effect on the US economy? Is that just before we all die? It is a case of “sure the ecosystems would be collapsing but we would save on winter heating costs!”
By Moody’s own admission, the report doesn’t calculate a number of climate change impacts that are likely to affect the economy, including the increased likelihood of expensive natural disasters.
Nor does Moody’s tabulate the economic impact of geopolitical risk from things like climate refugees.
That seems like a mighty big rug to sweep things under. Second order effects can be huge. Also 30 years is a small time window.
Overall the impacts seem fairly large when they are expressed in trillions of dollars, but very much unrealistically small if I try to think of what might happen in the real world.
Full report here: https://www.moodysanalytics.com/-/media/article/2019/economic-implications-of-climate-change.pdf
Basically, they model the oil price falling more the worse the warming, and the lower oil price offsets the negatives for the US.
The key vectors for economic change they model are:
Sea-level rise » Human health effects » Heat effect on labor productivity » Agricultural productivity » Tourism » Energy demand
Is anyone modeling what happens when nuclear capable countries become fairly uninhabitable?
Interestingly, this point came up when I argued with my brother about climate change. He used it as a gotcha as in, “if climate change is a real problem, why is everyone talking about reducing emissions rather than reforestation?” Not being a scientist, I didn’t have an answer ready to hand, and merely pointed out that we don’t need to have every technical detail at our fingertips in order to be concerned about the alarm bells the vast majority of climate scientists have been ringing for years. Thinking about it later, I imagined that perhaps reforestation wouldn’t be effective on the necessarily short time scale we are dealing with.
But, maybe I was wrong? If planting a gajillion trees will help, I’m all for it!
Unsurprisingly, the idea here is that it would be in concert with emissions reduction, not in lieu of it.
“This new quantitative evaluation shows [forest] restoration isn’t just one of our climate change solutions, it is overwhelmingly the top one,” said Prof Tom Crowther at the Swiss university ETH Zürich, who led the research. “What blows my mind is the scale. I thought restoration would be in the top 10, but it is overwhelmingly more powerful than all of the other climate change solutions proposed.”
Crowther emphasised that it remains vital to reverse the current trends of rising greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and forest destruction, and bring them down to zero. He said this is needed to stop the climate crisis becoming even worse and because the forest restoration envisaged would take 50-100 years to have its full effect of removing 200bn tonnes of carbon.
I guess the challenge is stopping all the forces of de-forestation which are already 1000x the re-forestation efforts.
Tim_N
5514
That was an interesting article.
Relatedy, have you guys heard of the search engine ecosia? It plants trees every ~45 searches you do with it. I know, micro - action won’t save the world, captain planet lied to us, but they’ve planted 61 million trees so far and it beats your ad consumption just going to Corp profits.
Cool, can’t hurt to switch if it’s halfway decent. But how can 45 searches cover the cost of planting a tree? My slacktivism-skepticism spidey sense is tingling. Still, thanks for the heads up.
Tim_N
5516
I’ve found it covers 85% of my needs. Sometimes there are very specific things that I am looking for that only Google seems to be able to find, but it isn’t hard to switch back when necessary. I suppose it doesn’t cost much to plant a tree, but I was as surprised as you. If you go here: https://info.ecosia.org/what, they have tree planting receipts and financial reports in an effort to build trust.
They also don’t use third party trackers, so like duckduckgo the privacy aspect is another positive.
