Another exciting #GameStudies book around the corner!
"#Ecogames" brings together chapters by a diverse group of authors to explore the shape, impact, and cultural context of ecocritical engagement in and through #VideoGames. 🌱🌎🎮
Nature's Warnings: Classic Stories of Eco-Science Fiction
This volume explores a range of prescient and thoughtful stories from SF’s classic period, from accounts of exhausted resources and ecocatastrophe to pertinent warnings of ecosystems thrown off balance and puzzles of adaptation and responsibility as humanity ventures into the new environments of the future.
#Today, I am celebrating my 4 years without flying ✈️.
The #Earth’s #climate is perturbed by #human activites. One of the easiest things to do towards #sustainability is to cut air travels. Thus, 4 years ago, I cut my frequent flyer cards and decided to #StayGrounded, using only low-#carbon travel means such as #train.
"Increased heat and humidity potentially threaten people and societies. Here, we incorporate our laboratory-measured, physiologically based wet-bulb temperature thresholds across a range of air temperatures and relative humidities, to project future heat stress risk from bias-corrected climate model output."
📌 Google Research, American Airlines, and Breakthrough Energy have collaborated to develop #forecast maps for contrail formation (the white trails seen behind flying airplanes) using artificial intelligence based on #data such as satellite images, meteorological data, and flight paths.
📌 The goal is to assist pilots in choosing routes that minimize contrail formation, which contributes to approximately 35% of #globalwarming caused by #aviation.
📌 As a result, test flights with Google's AI-based predictions and open-source contrail models have reduced contrail formation by 54%.
I'm starting to get really tired of "should" posting, especially about #climatechange. I saw a post recently saying that personal responsibility was pointless, and that we should try to end capitalism, we should take the fight to the governments, armies and companies who cause the most pollution, and we should start a revolution to save the planet.
I see lots of calls to action, but no action.
I'm just doing what I can as an ordinary person to reduce my impact on the environment. I know it isn't going to save the world, but at this point, what else can I do? Honestly, I;m not ready to go to jail, die, or kill in order to fight climate change, and I doubt most people are at that point either. Most of us are just trying to survive.
If you want to start the revolution, be my guest, but you shouldn't shame people for the little they can do, and you certainly shouldn't post expecting others to fight your battles for you. Be the change you want to see in the world, because if people's actions had the same passion and gumption behind them as their posts on #Mastodon, the world would be very different now.
I was a member of a birding group on another social media platform that I have now left for the reason described below. A member of the group shared a photo of what he asserted was an overheated oriole that he found on a paved road. He took the bird into his air-conditioned car, cooled it down, and then released it. I commented that it was an example of how birds can be adversely affected by climate change as documented in some journal articles. Shortly thereafter, my comment was removed. I sent a note to one of the group administrators, a past president of a statewide ornithological group, and was told my comment was removed because the group prohibits political statements. I guess we live in a time when a widely accepted position of scientists can be considered political, and censoring that position can be considered apolitical. 🤷♂️
Some want us to believe that #GlobalWarming somehow only recently came into the mainstream. This is false and easy to prove. Here's two screenshots from Mobile Police Patlabor, an #anime from 1988 which I watched as a kid.
We knew, everybody knew. It's just that the #FossilFuels industry lobbied hard for politicians to look the other way.
Texas continues to bake, as blistering heat wave shows no sign of letting up
The suffocating heat is expected to last through the weekend, with places like Corpus Christi forecast to endure record high temperatures that feel as hot as 119 degrees.
Tornadoes in Texas while they bake from the heat!
Baseball to softball sized hail today in Colorado.