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🔥🐸💦🔥 Rising Global Sea Surface Temperatures: Consequences, Causes, and the Faustian Bargain [Science Sunday][May 2024]
Myth’s Note: At first, it was supposed to be a quick joke image; months later down the research rabbit hole, and especially with recent updates, this article has become a bit of an unwieldy monster at nearly nine thousand words. This may take multiple reading sessions to get through. However, in an attempt to help readers keep track and pace themselves, I’ve organized this piece into the following sections:
I. The Watched Pot
II. A Quick Dip into SST Measurement History
III. The Consequences: Thermal Expansion, Ocean Currents, Atmospheric Energy, Habitat Destruction and Marine Heatwaves.
IV. The Causes: Anthropogenic GHG Emissions, El Niño, Aerosols and the Faustian Bargain
If you were inspired by this article to write and publish your own, then I would sincerely appreciate citation. Additionally, and if I’ve set this up correctly, there should be a text-to-speech audio version in the Substack app if you’d prefer to listen.
As always, we’ll start with a meme – and so, without further ado, please enjoy!
I want you all to imagine, if only for a moment, that you are a far off visitor approaching Earth. Perhaps you’ve managed to catch a ride upon the latest ship passing through the night – the first detected interstellar traveler to pass through our little solar system, ‘Oumuamua (a messenger from afar arriving first).
As you pass us by here on Spaceship Earth, you will definitely notice something rather peculiar about our pale blue dot – it’s a planet rich with water (liquid and frozen), covered by swirling clouds (mostly water vapor) above a few landmasses…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Boiling A Turkey
Boiling A Turkey
There is an age old fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will try and save itself. However, if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The metaphor is often ascribed to the inability, or unwillingness, of people to react to or be aware of threats which arise gradually rather than suddenly.
This metaphor was brought to mind as I was writing last weekend’s newsletter discussing the issue of Turkey and the potential threat posed to the global economy. Specifically, I was intrigued by the following points from Daniel Lacalle:
“The collapse of Turkey was an accident waiting to happen and is fully self-inflicted.”
It is yet another evidence of the train wreck that monetarists cause in economies. Those that say that ‘a country with monetary sovereignty can issue all the currency it wants without risk of default’ are wrong yet again. Like in Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Venezuela, monetary sovereignty means nothing without strong fundamentals to back the currency.
Turkey took all the actions that MMT lovers applaud. The Erdogan government seized control of the central bank, and decided to print and keep extremely low rates to ‘boost the economy’ without any measure or control.
Turkey’s Money Supply tripled in seven years, and rates were brought down massively to 4,5%.
However, the lira depreciation was something that was not just accepted by the government but encouraged. Handouts in fresh-printed liras were given to pensioners in order to increase votes for the current government, subsidies in rapidly devaluing lira soared by more than 20% (agriculture, fuel, tourism industry) as the government tried to compensate the loss of tourism revenues due to security concerns with subsidies and grants.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…