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Fruit Chaos Is Coming

March 13, 2024

Fruit Chaos Is Coming

Climate change is threatening to turn sublime summer stone fruits disgusting, or rob us of their pleasures entirely.

A peach with a lit wick where the stem would be, like a firecracker.
Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Summer, to me, is all about stone fruit: dark-purple plums, peaches you can smell from three feet away. But last summer, I struggled to find peaches at the farmers’ markets in New York City. A freak deep freeze in February had taken them out across New York State and other parts of the Northeast, buds shriveling on the branch as temperatures plummeted below zero and a brutally cold, dry wind swept through the region.

The loss was severe. One farmer estimated that the Hudson Valley lost 90 percent of its stone fruit. Evan Lentz, a faculty member in the plant-science department at the University of Connecticut, told me his state lost 50 to 75 percent. Another freeze in the second half of May damaged lots of other crops, including strawberries and blueberries. In New Hampshire, apple growers who went to bed with orchards full of pink blossoms awoke to petals turning brown. Georgia, the iconic peach state, lost some 90 percent of last year’s crop—a Georgia summer without peaches, an unfathomable thing. An unusually warm winter robbed the trees of the period of cold they need to bloom in the spring. The buds that did emerge were, like the ones in the Northeast, killed by a cold snap in the early spring.

Fruit trees evolved to live in more stable conditions; they’re exquisitely well adapted to the rhythm of a usual year. But instead of reliable seasons, they’re getting weather chaos: Springtime, already somewhat of a wild-card season, “is getting more and more erratic,” Theodore DeJong, a fruit-tree physiologist at UC Davis, told me. As a result, trees’ sense of seasonality is scrambled. And instead of reliable peaches and plums, we’re getting fruit chaos. It may not happen every year, but it’s happening more frequently.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Anthropocene is a Joke

July 22, 2022

Crumbling ruins in a desert
Stuart Gleave / Getty

THE ANTHROPOCENE IS A JOKE

On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.

Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told. Whereas some epochs in Earth history stretch more than 40 million years, this new chapter started maybe 400 years ago, when carbon dioxide dipped by a few parts per million in the atmosphere. Or perhaps, as a panel of scientists voted earlier this year, the epoch started as recently as 75 years ago, when atomic weapons began to dust the planet with an evanescence of strange radioisotopes.

These are unusual claims about geology, a field that typically deals with mile-thick packages of rock stacked up over tens of millions of years, wherein entire mountain ranges are born and weather away to nothing within a single unit of time, in which extremely precise rock dates—single-frame snapshots from deep time—can come with 50,000-year error bars, a span almost 10 times as long as all of recorded human history. If having an epoch shorter than an error bar seems strange, well, so is the Anthropocene.

So what to make of this new “epoch” of geological time? Do we deserve it? Sure, humans move around an unbelievable amount of rock every year, profoundly reshaping the world in our own image. And, yes, we’re currently warping the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans violently, and in ways that have analogues in only a few terrifying chapters buried deep in Earth’s history. Each year we spew more than 100 times as much CO2 into the air as volcanoes do, and we’re currently overseeing the biggest disruption to the planet’s nitrogen cycle in 2.5 billion years. But despite this incredible effort, all is vanity. Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks

November 15, 2017

‘The Atlantic’ Commits Malpractice, Selectively Edits To Smear WikiLeaks

Everyone was buzzing about the shocking, bombshell new report by The Atlantic yesterday, which revealed that Donald Trump Jr. and the WikiLeaks Twitter account had engaged in a “largely one-sided” conversation in private messages over the course of several months.

Don Jr. actually comes off looking fairly normal in the report, while WikiLeaks comes off looking weird and sleazy in a way that will likely damage its reputation even further than the mainstream media campaign to smear the outlet already has. WikiLeaks is seen asking for favors Trump never fulfilled, making recommendations Trump Jr. didn’t act upon, and asking for leaks Trump Jr. never gave them, which when you step back and think about it are actually fairly normal things for a leak outlet to do, all things considered. But the following passage from the Atlantic report makes the whole thing look far darker:

It is the third reason, though, Wikileaks wrote, that “is the real kicker.” “If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” Wikileaks explained. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.”

See that full stop at the end of the last sentence there? That’s journalistic malpractice. We learned this when Donald Trump Jr. published the entirety of his private messages with WikiLeaks in response to the Atlantic article:

Julia Ioffe

✔@juliaioffe

SCOOP: Turns out Donald Trump, Jr. corresponded with Wikileaks during the 2016 presidential campaign. My latest. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/ …

The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and Wikileaks

The transparency organization asked the president’s son for his cooperation—in sharing its work, in contesting the results of the election, and in arranging for Julian Assange to be Australia’s…

theatlantic.com

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Delusions of David Frum’s Mind

August 20, 2015

The Delusions of David Frum’s Mind

Stephen Harper make you worried and angry? Chill, says Canada’s prodigal Republican son.

David Frum is not here anymore. That’s apparent from the defence of Stephen Harper he published in The Atlantic yesterday. It’s full of spin and falsehoods evident to those who actually live in Canada and are paying attention.

Born to a famous Canadian family, Frum leftlong ago to toil in the fertile vineyards of right-wing America, landing a White House job selling George W. Bush’s war, and then permanent pundit status.

Now, like an ex-pat come home on vacation but oblivious to all the torn-down landmarks, he argues Canadians have no right to be angry at what Harper has done to their democracy.

Our PM, he writes, is just a misunderstood “cerebral” who runs “a tight ship.”

This in supposed rebuttal to Stephen Marche’s barnburner of a Harper indictment, “The Closing of the Canadian Mind,” last week by the New York Times. Nothing to see here, Frum tells his largely American readers, move along. But his tries at puncturing Marche’s arguments fail either through willful or lazy ignorance.

First he banks on his readers not having read Marche’s piece, nor lived through nine years of Harper rule.

 

“So what did Stephen Harper actuallydo?” asks the supposedly flummoxed Frum. “How precisely did the Canadian prime minister silence debate, suppress information, and squelch democracy?”

He implies Marche lacks facts, when in fact Marche musters many facts, including the muzzling of scientists, killing of the long-form census, defunding of Arctic research, the robocalls scandal, and more. Frum makes believe none of this is in the piece, nor, one presumes, retrievable via Google. “You’re just supposed to know,” whines the policy wonk. (Okay, let’s help him then, with this piece Tyee list of 70 Harper abuses.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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