EDIBLE GARDEN: Kathleen Gannon from Ermington
- Kathleen’s permaculture garden continues to delight judges who have seen the garden develop and change over the years.
- It contains a mixture of fruit trees, herbs, berries, salad greens, veges, and ornamentals, and was in fine form this year.
FRED HOYLE SMILES: Berries and sugars essential to life detected in meteorites, a first.
Horses 🐎 love Butterflies and vice versa: In the Czech Republic, horses have become the knights in shining armor
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic
The Grist has compiled a list of articles written by Coby Beck “containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming”. Here are some snippets from a few of the articles.The temperature record is unreliable:
There is actually some truth to the part about the difficulties; scientists have overcome many of them in turning the hundreds of thousands of measurements taken in many different ways and over a span of more than a dozen decades into a single globally averaged trend.Global warming has been going on for the last 20,000 years:
But this is the nature of science — no one said it was easy. It’s taken the scientific community a long time to finally come out and say that what we have been observing for 100 years is in fact exactly what it looks like. All other possible explanations (for example, the Urban Heat Island effect) have been investigated, the data has been examined and re-examined, reviewed and re-reviewed, and the conclusion has become unassailable.
If you have look at this graph of temperature, starting at a point when we were finishing the climb out of deep glaciation, you can clearly see that rapid warming ceased around 10,000 years ago (rapid relative to natural fluctuations, but not compared to the warming today, which is an order of magnitude faster). After a final little lift 8,000 years ago, temperature trended downward for the entire period of the Holocene. So the post-industrial revolution warming is the reversal of a many-thousand-year trend.It’s the sun, stupid:
There has been work done reconstructing the solar irradiance record over the last century, before satellites were available. According to the Max Planck Institute, where this work is being done, there has been no increase in solar irradiance since around 1940.It’s cold today in Wagga Wagga:
The chaotic nature of weather means that no conclusion about climate can ever be drawn from a single data point, hot or cold. The temperature of one place at one time is just weather, and says nothing about climate, much less climate change, much less global climate change.Go forth and spread the truth as you travel to dine at various holidays tables around the country. (P.S. I first posted a link to this series in 2006. That it’s almost more necessary now than it was then is beyond depressing.)
Poynter's Thanksgiving gratitude list
Kristen Hare, local innovation reporter:
This year, I’m thankful for the local journalists who keep
grinding every single day. I’m thankful for the journalists in chain
newspapers, like people at McClatchy, Gannett and the former Gatehouse, who are
unsure about their future but still show up for their communities. I’m thankful
to the journalists who have started local newsrooms, including in Kansas
and Mississippi,
filling in space that traditional news has left. I’m thankful to student
journalists, like
those at KU, who are finding new ways to bring local news back. And I’m
thankful to local newsrooms that refuse to quit, like the Albany Times-Union,
which spent
16 years covering the cult down the street.
Alanna Dvorak, interactive learning producer:
I’m grateful for Deadspin (RIP) and the great journalists that
made it what it was. For years, I visited that site because of its irreverent
take on sports and willingness to look at the social, cultural and, yes,
political implications of sports. Diana
Moskovitz produced fantastic investigative work; Laura
Wagner was always willing to call out journalism organizations that
mistreated or otherwise took advantage of employees; and Drew
Magary remains one of the most engaging and hilarious writers on the web.
And while I’m grateful for what Deadspin was, I am also grateful for the
reporters who were willing to stick to their principles. I hope in the future
more journalists will be able to garner the support and financial ability to do
the same if the situation requires it.
Ren LaForme, digital tools reporter:
This year, I’m grateful for a lot of things: the righteous
sabotage of a media company mis-run
by “the adults in the room,” journalists being
dorks on TikTok, and anything
and
everything
that
Taylor
Lorenz
writes.
But mostly I’m grateful for the nameless masses who we’ll never hear from and
never remember because they take one moment to think about the consequences of
their actions before they tweet. Twitter often feels like a game of Fortnite —
someone is always just a half-second away from knifing you in the back for fake
internet points (is that how Fortnite works?). So here’s to the folks who
deleted words that punched down instead of up, left that unnecessarily snarky
tweet in their drafts or logged off completely and read a book or something.
I’m grateful for you, restraint-haver.
Alex Mahadevan, MediaWise senior multimedia reporter:
I’m thankful for all of the weirdos doing weird journalism in
weird ways — especially in an industry in which hedge fund owners threaten to
stamp out all weirdness in pursuit of profit. Last month, Slate senior writer Ashley
Feinberg, an expert in everything Extremely Online, exposed Sen.
Mitt Romney’s burner Twitter account. Feinberg dug into the hell world of
Twitter to surface Romney’s
account, which he puppeted using the name Pierre Delecto. Feinberg has been
a consistent voice helping readers understand the terrifying state of the
Internet. We may all have brain worms from being Online, but at least we know
why and how it’s happening thanks to Feinberg.
Wendy Wallace, director of advancement:
I’m grateful for creative ways to pay for journalism. Major
national funders pool their money to pay for journalism through the NewsMatch project
and the ambitious Teach for America spinoff Report
for America. News industry nonprofits like the Local Media Association,
Lenfest Institute and Poynter organize conferences, workshops and innovation
tours and produce newsletters to give newsrooms of all sizes the chance to
learn what’s working and how it might apply to them. The
Guardian and other outlets find clever ways to nudge readers to pay for the
content they value so much. And I’m especially grateful to the 1
in 5 individuals who subscribe or donate to a local news organization and
the 3
in 5 who consider their local newspaper an important symbol of civic pride.
Barbara Allen, managing editor, poynter.org:
My favorite newsletter this year has become the
Muck Rack Daily, which hits my inbox right after lunch and often gives me
the insight — and frankly, laughs — to help me finish my day strong. This
"daily digest of journalism, written by journalists" provides a list
of the best stories in journalism for that day, whether they are serious
investigations or long-form narratives. The best part is that the authors
pepper each item with A+ gifs and clever Twitter responses from other
journalists and stakeholders. Their subject line game is strong as well, with
each day's a line from a notable tweet — those reallllllly make you want to
click them. Some of my recent favorites:
'Drugs. Hell Yeah.'
'What’s that snappy Latin phrase?'
'The investigations are coming from inside the House'
How could you not want to open those?
'Drugs. Hell Yeah.'
'What’s that snappy Latin phrase?'
'The investigations are coming from inside the House'
How could you not want to open those?
Sara O’Brien, multimedia designer
I’m grateful for tools that push me out of my design comfort
zone. When you’re busy, it’s easy to rely over and over on the same old
software and programs you’ve always used, (I’m looking at you, Adobe Creative
Suite!). But when given the time to explore different and fun ways to create,
new tools can add an exciting edge to your work. This year, one of those tools
has been befunky.com.
It has allowed me to easily and efficiently give a fresh new look to our Cohort
newsletter here at Poynter. Also, as a video editor, tools like otter.ai
have been a huge time saver for me. Rather than sift through hours of video for
the right sound clips, this tool transcribed my audio so that I was able to go
through the physical scripts as needed. This was an enormously helpful tool for
me during the process of creating our
annual fundraising video on a strict timeline.
Daniel Funke, PolitiFact reporter:
I’m thankful for the continued success of The Bitter Southerner, an online web magazine dedicated to telling long-form stories about the South. Launched in 2013 by Chuck Reece, a fellow University of Georgia and Red & Black alumnus, The Bitter Southerner doesn’t write about most Americans’ stereotypical view of a backwards, racist, gun-toting South — “It is about the South that the rest of us know: the one we live in today and the one we hope to create in the future.” One week the site will publish a story about the origin of Nashville hot chicken, only to write about drag queen bingo in Tallahassee the week after. The Bitter Southerner relies on freelancers, including authors like Charles McNair and Daniel Wallace, and makes money through a network of contributing Family Members and an online general store. Even if you don’t care about reading layered, beautifully produced narratives about the most interesting region in the United States, you might find a T-shirt or two you like — and you’ll support thoughtful, stereotype-bashing journalism in the process.Conan, the dog that helped take down al-Baghdadi, gets White House welcome
ZONING EARTH “RESIDENTIAL.” Jeff Bezos’ Plan to Save Earth? ‘Move All Heavy Industry into Space.’
