You ever notice how little oxygen in the room there is to panic about the catastrophic rise of gambling and betting markets on smartphones yet there is unlimited oxygen in the tech press to panic about social media smartphone use and AI in a way that "paradoxically" favors consolidation of power into those realms and distracts from a massively profitable collapse of the well being of vulnerable people into gambling addiction?

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/15/australias-social-media-ban-was-pushed-by-ad-agency-focused-on-gambling-ads-it-didnt-want-banned/

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-ban-group-funded-firm-making-gambling-ads/

We’ve talked about the Australian social media ban that went into effect last week, how dumb it is, and why it’s already a mess.

But late last week, some additional news broke that makes the whole thing even more grotesque: turns out the campaign pushing hardest for the ban was run by an ad agency that makes gambling ads. The same gambling ads that were facing their own potential ban—until the Australian government decided that, hey, with all the kids kicked off social media, gambling ads can stay.

Unsurprisingly, models of this kind, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been seized on by “special interests” such as the fossil fuel industry to argue for minimal responses to the climate crisis. And it’s not just the oil companies.

Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the living planet, has given $3.5m (£2.6m) to a junktank run by Bjorn Lomborg, who has built his career on promoting Nordhaus’s model, thus helping to downplay the need for climate action. Nordhaus was awarded the Nobel Memorial prize for economics for his pernicious nonsense – and it is deeply embedded in government decision-making.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36914262

A meeting of G7 nations on the environment begins in Paris on Thursday but climate change has been left off the agenda to avoid a row with the United States.

Aldo Leopold saw this in the eyes of a dying wolf: when we no longer fear nature, we are on the road to its destruction

Can we, Leopold asked, accept that Earth does not exist for our comfort? Can we accept a world that depends on predators and other forces we cannot control? Can we accept our fear? For Leopold, these questions pointed in the same direction: can we learn to think like a mountain?

100 years since and I'd suggest an emphatic no

On the heels of Artemis II, our cultural obsession with space colonization continues, even as we face increasing global resource constraints and planetary health declines. Techno-optimists, including some of the wealthiest among us, dream of a future where we mine, travel to, and colonize other planets – all in the hopes of bypassing the problems we now face on Earth. But from the perspective of physics and ecology, how feasible is space colonization – and are these interplanetary ambitions blinding us to the miracle of the planetary spaceship we already inhabit?

Climate change is already at work

As floods become more extreme, farmers are now taking serious hits – especially in Queensland.

In 2019, floods and sticky mud trapped and killed up to 500,000 cows.

In 2022, record-breaking floods caused a national lettuce shortage.

In 2023, floods hit banana, mango and avocado crops.

In 2025, over 100,000 cows died in outback Queensland due to flooding.

This summer, it happened again. Over 48,000 cattle are dead or missing after extreme flooding in northwest Queensland.

Rising temperatures also make life harder for the animals and plants we rely on. Heat stress is on the rise in livestock. When animals are too hot, their health can suffer and milk and meat production falls.

When floods devastated Lismore in 2022, the New South Wales town had empty supermarket shelves for months after main roads and freight lines were cut.

But farmers’ markets reopened within a week. As one farmer’s market manager told experts:

supermarket shelves were completely empty [but] we had all this produce.

Those who are convicted of sleeping outdoors could be given the option to avoid jail time by instead entering into a mandatory treatment program for at least 12 months. The bill authorizes local governments to set up semi-permanent camps in remote areas, where defendants would be required to stay and receive treatment.

...

He described it as a “cruel theater of the absurd” based on “the lie that people choose to be homeless.” The law, he said, “assumes our communities have plenty of affordable apartments and lots of mental and physical health services available.”

In reality, he said, these services are chronically underfunded, and the city would need to build about 55,000 more affordable rental units to provide enough housing for its rent-burdened population.

Though it is not uncommon for homeless people to struggle with mental health or substance use issues, increases in the cost of housing have been shown to have a direct relationship with increasing homelessness.

Homelessness in New Orleans dropped considerably in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, when Congress provided permanent housing subsidies for those in need. But after those funds have dried up, homelessness in the city shot up higher than before the pandemic, a study by the homelessness nonprofit UNITY of Greater New Orleans found in 2024.

About 12 percent of plastic waste is burned globally, according to a landmark study based on data through 2015. Even when done in incinerators equipped with air scrubbers and filters, such burning is linked to higher rates of premature birth, congenital abnormalities including heart and neural tube defects, and may increase cancer risk for those living nearby, studies have found.

But when plastics—which a Nature study last year found can contain any of more than 16,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which may pose health concerns—are burned in low-tech furnaces lacking any pollution-reduction technology, the dangers are far greater.

That’s exactly what happens in Tropodo, a tofu production center where informal backyard factories use plastic as a fuel for making the soy-based staple.

...

His parents were tofu-makers too, and when he was a boy, their factory burned rice husks. But they began using plastic in the 1980s, so when he started his own company, he did too. He later switched to wood, but when his wood supplier closed, he went back to plastic. “It’s good, and cheap,” he tells me. All Tropodo’s tofu factories burn plastic, he says, and he doesn’t see any problem with it.

Much of the plastic Gufron and factory owners like him use is waste from overseas—packaging tossed away in places such as the United States, Europe, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. He buys it from local sorters who purchase it from paper recycling companies. Plastic scrap is often mixed in with the bundles of waste paper those companies import, and they must remove it before processing the paper. Indonesian regulations limit such contamination to 2 percent of any shipment, and while the industry insists violations are rare, Daru Setyorini, the environmentalist and researcher who has accompanied me to Tropodo, says that in reality, the amount of plastic can far exceed that limit.

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An adult eating an egg like the one found in Tropodo would exceed Europe’s acceptable maximum intake of chlorinated dioxins—chemicals linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and hormonal changes—by 70 times, the groups reported. The eggs also contained short-chain chlorinated paraffins and polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are both used as flame retardants in plastic and are linked to hormonal disruption, developmental and neurological damage, and cancer.

Chickens wander everywhere in Indonesian villages, and Tropodo is far from the only place where they peck through toxic ash. Many rural areas lack garbage collection, so households there often burn their waste. The faint whiff of that smoke hangs everywhere, and I often see hens munching their way through the blackened remains of such fires.

The threat goes far beyond Indonesia, of course, to everywhere plastic is burned out in the open. In Accra, Ghana, for example, researchers testing eggs near one of the world’s largest electronic waste scrapyards, where workers burn plastic culled from discarded devices, found chlorinated dioxin levels more than three times Tropodo’s very dangerous levels.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/28710372

Among 18 rich countries, satisfaction with healthcare quality fell sharply after Covid hit and remains well below pre-pandemic levels. It is typically thought that domestic policy determines the challenges of healthcare but the article points out that, despite healthcare funding being the highest it has ever been, outside Covid productivity has stalled.

The Australian workforce has grown by 20% since 2019 but elective surgeries have flatlined and people are waiting longer to be seen. France, Canada, Germany, the US and the UK are similarly ailing.

But the bit of the report that caught my attention was something that has been right under my nose.

We know that Covid caused a mass exodus of nurses and doctors who resigned or retired early.

But the ones who stayed often reduced (note: not stopped) their “discretionary effort” such as staying back, teaching, mentoring or doing the myriad things that help the profession thrive. Medicine has become more transactional for everyone, not just patients.

...

The problem is that administrators still think that stress, burnout and “quiet quitting” are individual issues to be expunged even when the evidence shows that they are systemic and affect patient care.

The 4,140-sq-km bay is the largest estuary on the west coast of the US. Before 2018, this species of whales wasn't known to stop seasonally or consistently in the bay, bypassing it on their migration route down to Baja California and back up the Arctic, said Josephine Slaathaug, who led a recent study on gray whale mortality in the bay.

The impressive gray whales have the longest annual migration of any mammal, travelling an approximate 15,000-20,000km roundtrip to breed.

Fig. 1: Land subsidence in global deltas.

Each circle represents the location of the 40 deltas evaluated in this study, colour-coded by the average land subsidence rate. The size of the circle represents the percentage of the delta area subsiding faster than geocentric SLR. For visualization purposes, the geocentric SLR rate is shown as a colour gradient over entire watersheds or basins, although this does not represent the actual extent of exposure. Global coastlines are based on public-domain data from the CIA World DataBank II (using GSHHG (Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database)), distributed with MATLAB. The delta basin polygons were obtained along with the sediment flux dataset from ref. 29.

Link to open access article..

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09928-6

It can help to shift from long-range certainty-seeking to values-based navigation. Instead of asking, “Will this matter in 50 years?” try asking, “What matters to me now, and how can I build a life that honors that?” This is a core insight from acceptance-based approaches to anxiety. When we loosen our grip on specific outcomes and orient ourselves toward what we value, we can become more resilient and sustain our motivation. Values travel with us, and they’re what allow us to keep pivoting as circumstances change.

Ministers must get to grips with the “national scandal” of England’s shadow child social care system, the children’s commissioner has warned, as a report reveals the number of children in unregulated settings has increased by more than 370% in five years.

Some of the most vulnerable children in England are being temporarily placed in unregulated caravans, Airbnbs and holiday camps, which risk the “accumulation of increasing levels of harm for children who have already faced enough distress for several lifetimes”, according to the report.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/50740383

"We were fighting over who had caught more fish, and then I saw my crewmate pushed overboard by the captain," Akbar Fitrian, 29, an Indonesian crewmember says as he recounts an incident aboard a Chinese-owned fishing vessel in 2022. "The ship then started to drive away as my crewmate tried to swim towards us. And then I don't know what happened. The captain never reported the incident."

...

There is the lawless nature of the seas, which has emboldened traffickers to exploit desperate fishermen and impoverished casual laborers. Then there are the geopolitical factors at play: In a race to dominate the seas, China and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Malaysia have all built outposts and bases on shoals, reefs and atolls. Fishing fleets — of which China has the largest in the world — are fast becoming more militarized as a result.

All of this has imposed a heavy cost on unique ecosystems and led to devastating socioeconomic impacts on artisanal and small-scale fishers.

...

The first time Donald Carmen [a fisherman from The Phlippines] was harassed by Chinese boats off the coast of Palawan was in December 2024. The following February, they harassed him and another fisherman again, getting close enough to hit their outriggers. "They forced us to move away and recorded us with cell phones and cameras. I have been fishing in this area since 2016, and back then, everyone was free to fish. I would catch 400-500 kilograms of fish in a night, about 60 nautical miles offshore. Now, because I don't dare venture out as far, I'm lucky if I catch 200-300 kilograms over three days," Carmen said as he steered his banca just weeks later, on the lookout for Chinese fishing boats and militia.

...

Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is inextricably linked to the geopolitical struggle for maritime dominance in the South China Sea. Over the past two decades, China has rapidly scaled up its fishing militias in a race to assert control over a vast area while trying to meet the country's insatiable demand for seafood. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan have followed suit on a much smaller scale.

...

While Chinese aggression has persisted for years in areas off Zambales, a province of the Philippines, it has only recently affected waters off the coast of Rizal in Palawan, as China is believed to be building up its presence in the Sabina and Bombay shoals, much closer to the Filipino coast — encroaching on the Philippines' claim to the Kalayaan Island Group — from its original areas of claim like the Spratly Islands and the Scarborough Shoal. Among some of the tactics used by Chinese fishing militias to deter fishermen are water cannons, using swarming and encircling techniques, military-grade lasers and ramming fishing boats to intimidate and drive them from fishing grounds.

As countries in the region militarize their fishing fleets, the cost will ultimately be detrimental to ecological sustainability and geopolitical stability.

...

Labor rights activists at the Migrant Resource Center in Pemalang, Indonesia, fishermen and a widow of a woman still fighting for compensation after her husband's death say agencies in central Java are adept at recruiting Indonesian crew to work primarily on Chinese fishing vessels, entrapping them in a cycle of debt bondage and, in many cases, effectively enslaving them at sea.

...

"In order to work on the fishing vessel, which was Chinese-owned, I was given a loan of 4 million Rupiah," Akbar Fitrian, 29, a fisherman interviewed in Jakarta, explains. "1 million went to paying for fishing equipment, and then I had to work until I paid back the other 3 million. Sometimes, I had to keep borrowing more to continue working to pay off the initial loan. Sometimes I would only end up with enough salary to buy cigarettes. Sometimes I went into the red."

...

Overfishing occurs because high demand and global overconsumption for seafood far exceed the ocean's ability to replenish itself. Growing markets — especially in China, the European Union and North America — have transformed fish and fish products into a highly profitable global commodity. Exports from Southeast Asia alone amount to over $5 billion worth of fish products to the United States each year, illustrating the scale of international trade. This demand fuels industrial-scale fishing operations such as bottom trawlers and purse seiners, which sweep through vast areas of ocean indiscriminately. Supported by government subsidies, these fleets prioritize maximum yield, even when fish stocks are already severely depleted.

...

Web Archive link

“I wanted to let people know what happened and however bad they thought that it might be inside USAID when Doge came in to tear it apart, it was way worse – especially the incompetence, ignorance and cruelty that came along with it,” Enrich writes

Some glaciers don’t just melt—they explode into motion, and climate change is making them far harder to predict.

A hidden threat is emerging in the world’s glaciers: while most are shrinking, a rare group known as “surging glaciers” can suddenly accelerate, unleashing powerful and sometimes destructive events. Scientists have identified over 3,100 of these glaciers worldwide, with many clustered in high-risk regions like the Arctic and the Karakoram Mountains, where communities lie directly in their path.

Fig. 1. a) Historical hurricane tracks that came within our search range (250 km of New York City: dashed circle). The categories shown are based on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (Saffir, 1973, Simpson, 1974). Storm track color denotes hurricane category at a given location (see key). b) Inset showing tree-ring site locations for 1. Montauk, New York, 2. Mashomack, New York, and 3. Newport, Rhode Island. c) The scanned sample image (top) compared to the image that was produced using quantitative wood anatomy methods (bottom). d) Close up of cell detail for 1977 and 1978 with inset highlighting vessel tylosis and detail on earlywood and latewood separation within a growth ring. The base map for panel (a) and (b) was produced on NOAA's Historical Hurricane Track interactive mapper: https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/hurricanes.html

Fig. 2. Left: Residual (RES) tree-ring width chronologies from Montauk, New York (panel a), Newport, Rhode Island (panel b), and Mashomack, New York (panel c). Dashed vertical lines denote years of the most significant hurricane events around New York City (i.e., Category 2 or higher within the search radius). Right: Superposed Epoch Analysis showing the response of the normalized tree-ring width chronologies to the hurricane events, with colored uncertainty envelopes surrounding the black line representing the 5th and 95th percentiles of the growth response. The dashed and dotted lines refer to the 5th/95th and 1st/99th significance thresholds, respectively, using a random bootstrapping approach.

...

Importantly, the coastal oak chronologies do not show a strong climate signal from 1902 to 1999, except for Mashomack with a weakly significant and positive current-year signal with May/June precipitation (r = 0.26/0.26; p < 0.05) and SPEI-1 (r = 0.22/0.24, respectively; p < 0.05) (Fig. S2). Montauk shows a weakly positive correlation with previous year November/December precipitation (r = 0.23/0.22; p < 0.05) and November SPEI-1 (0.24; p < 0.05). Newport has weakly negative correlations with prior-year September precipitation (r = -0.27, p < 0.05) and SPEI-1 (r = -0.34, p < 0.05).

This is in contrast to inland tree-ring studies within the region that show stronger sensitivity to summer precipitation or drought variability (Levesque et al., 2017; Pederson et al., 2013). While the sheltered nature of Mashomack may provide an environmental niche more similar to inland forests allowing for the emergence of a weak summer climate signal, Montauk and Newport, seem to be insensitive to summer climate variability. Overall, although there were some significant correlations (p < 0.05) between climate variability from individual months and RW variability, correlations were weak (r < 0.3), some occurring in the previous year (t-1), and there were no notable correlation commonalities shared by the sites.

Our results fall in line with prior research in the region indicating that regional-scale climate variability is not the strongest limiting factor of radial growth of coastal trees. Rather, other environmental factors and ocean effects (Pearl et al., 2020; Tucker and Pearl, 2021) may play a more important role in their year-to-year radial growth. These trees are growing in a highly disturbance-prone region, very close to the sea, and subject to strong winds and salt spray. Paleotempestological tree-ring studies from more climate sensitive regions had success isolating a hurricane signature after removing the climate signal from the tree-ring data (Collins-Key and Altman, 2021). This filtering was not necessary here given the lack of strong climate signals across the sites.

...

Our study demonstrates that ring-width records from oak trees (Quercus spp.) growing at several coastal sites in New York and Rhode Island, and one beech site (Fagus grandifolia) from Massachusetts, capture major historical hurricane events over the 19th and 20th centuries. This is manifested by severely reduced ring width and latewood width, and for the Montauk site, relatively high lumen area ratio values in the year following the storm. In combination, this multi-parameter approach could help us better pin-point hurricane events prior to the observational record, particularly the strongest storms–Category 3 and larger in the tree-ring record.

Our results also show that wood anatomy from white oak (Quercus alba) from coastal forests, has strong potential in terms of hurricane detection, providing a critical first step in developing a protocol for analyzing these forests. Future studies could benefit from additional parameters (e.g., stable isotopes, additional anatomical traits), and/or other paleotempestological proxies (e.g., sediment cores), to develop a better understanding of historical hurricane activity across the northeastern United States.

Our findings also indicate that these forests demonstrate a remarkable capacity for recovery following large-scale disturbances, such as hurricanes. Unlike studies of conifers (Tucker et al., 2018; Fernandes et al., 2018), we found that oak and beech trees from Montauk, Newport, and Naushon Island sites had fully regained their radial growth by the second growing season after a hurricane, with trees at Mashomack only slightly lagging this rapid recovery. This suggests a high tolerance to disturbance for oaks (4 sites) and beech (1 site). Future investigations require more sites from a variety of tree species to elucidate differences in hurricane response depending on forest types (e.g. conifers vs angiosperms).

Despite the resilience of coastal forests to hurricane impacts, these forests are increasingly at risk from storm damage and surges, and continued sea-level rise. We would expect that compound events and stressors, such as sea-level rise, storm surges, and physical damage from hurricanes, could further alter site conditions beyond the thresholds these ecosystems can tolerate. Our results show that forest growth is already negatively correlated with sea-level height anomalies. Given the critical role these forests play in the sustainability of densely populated communities—by buffering wind, supporting dune infrastructure, enhancing groundwater recharge, and sustaining wildlife—greater attention is needed to study and protect remaining coastal forests.

link to open access article..

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092181812600144X

When 240 million gallons of raw sewage spilled into the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., starting in mid-January 2026 and running through mid-March, it was estimated to be the largest sewage spill in U.S. history. But it wasn't the first, nor will it be the last.

In fact, around the nation, sewage spills are contaminating waterways and communities with unsettling frequency.

The Boundary Waters are one of the most beautiful places on earth. This is an international crime.

While it was already known to be weakening, most climate models disagree on the exact magnitude of the decline, but generally point to a one-third reduction by 2100. However, this new study puts the figure at a much more substantial 51%.