Since 2015, the continent has shed sea ice equivalent to the area of Greenland. Researchers call it the largest environmental shift detected anywhere on Earth in recent decades. –– Earth dot com
Everything about Antarctica has defied the experts. For years Antarctic sea ice expanded when it wasn’t supposed to. Then, suddenly in 2016 the sea ice around Antarctica dramatically started to shrink, and that wasn’t supposed to happen either. Scientists wondered at the time if it was just a temporary blip, but then it got even smaller. Holes in the sea ice “as big as Switzerland” have started to appear for the first time since the mid 1970s.
To explain this mystery (that was rarely mentioned) a new paper suggests the salinity of surface waters has changed. We’re not just talking about a small piece of ocean, this is everything south of 50. For decades, the surface of the polar Southern Ocean was getting less salty — an “expected response to a warming climate” they said that started in about 1980, “however, this trend reversed abruptly after 2015”.
So as news seeps out this week that there is a “dangerous feedback loop” where shrinking ice is warming the ocean, bear in mind that the experts also admit this is “completely unexpected” which is their way of saying “the models were wrong”. Carbon dioxide was not supposed to do this.
Why does Facebook support so much identity theft? I had an actual account on Facebook for many years, but it was nuked without explanation back in 2022. After that, someone created a fake Facebook account in its place. The fake account is using one of my old email addresses, and that is causing Facebook to send me increasingly frequent reminders about something--but I cannot see what the scam is because I have no access to Facebook.
Montana lawmakers moved one step closer Thursday to passing a bill to ban TikTok from operating in the state, a move that’s bound to face legal challenges but also serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned.
So yeah, it's only a matter of time before a conservative State terminates intrastate use of the nefarious Chinese platform that young Americans cannot stop dancing on. Realistically, with VPN's and other browsing cleverness, how enforceable is such a ban? What will be the penalty to Montana's citizens for interacting with a forbidden site?
There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman? -- Woody Allen