#newdarkage

'Things are getting unstable': global heating and the rise of rockfalls in Swiss Alps | World news | The Guardian

A 10-minute drive from Davos, which hosts the World Economic Forum each year, Marcia Phillips, a scientist at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research, gets out of her car and looks at the Flüela Wisshorn. About 300,000 tons of rock fell off the mountain in March.

“It was very lucky that it happened during the night, because it is a very popular route with ski touring, so it could have easily killed several people,” she says.

Reports of the rockfall reached the scientists a few hours after the event because it is popular with tourists and close to a road. But most rockfalls happen in remote areas where nobody takes note, and very few can be surveyed and studied. On-site measurements of the unstable Piz Cengalo, for example, would simply be too dangerous. What’s certain, Phillips says, is that there have been more reports of rockfalls.

“At the moment we have the impression that a lot more is coming down,” she says, “and things have definitely got unstable.”

The reasons are complex. The structure of the mountain and the way it eroded over millennia play a role, as does the warming climate. In the past 120 years, temperatures in the Alps have risen by just under 2C – twice the global average.

One Shot Ten Years After | James Balog Photographing Climate Change from Nikon

At the start, in 2007, there were 25 Nikon cameras—D200s and D300s—in time-lapse rigs on glaciers around the world, placed to document one of the effects of global warming. Today there are 43 cameras—D5300s and D3200s, for the most part—at 24 sites.

Along with the 25 original cameras that took the pictures for that story were battery packs, voltage regulators, intervalometers, light sensors and solar panels. The cameras were able to shoot during daylight hours for eight months, then switch to two- or five-frames-per-day for the short months of the year. When the EIS crew checked the cameras, the memory cards were pulled and replaced.

"Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes.”

RangerBot: Programmed to Kill | Hakai Magazine

Russ Babcock, who studies COTS management at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, is optimistic about RangerBot’s potential to expand sea star control efforts into deeper, less accessible waters and gather high-quality data on corals and sea stars to inform current management. “I believe these things have a place in the toolbox of marine ecologists, and we’re getting closer and closer to the day when mere marine ecologists like myself can operate one without getting a robotics jockey to come along. Bring it on,” he says.

Eco-fascism is undergoing a revival in the fetid culture of the extreme right | Jason Wilson | World news | The Guardian

Contemporary eco-fascists are inspired by a number of key figures. One is “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, whose terrorist campaign against what he called “industrial society” combined violence, misanthropy and a self-dramatising manifesto. Kaczynski’s apocalyptic account of a doomed, destructive civilisation – further expounded in his voluminous prison writings – and his willingness to act as a self-appointed executioner of his adversaries is a central inspiration for the would-be terrorists in the eco-fascist movement.

Some, including Hanrahan, claim that the Netflix drama, “Manhunt: Unabomber”, aided the growth spurt of contemporary eco-fascism.

Another figure who gets a lot of play in contemporary eco-fascist circles is Finnish deep ecologist writer Pentti Linkola, who openly calls for an end to immigration, the reversion to pre-industrial life ways, and authoritarian measures to keep human life within strict limits.

Linkola is responsible for one of the starkest presentations of so-called “lifeboat ethics”, the idea that in the context of ongoing environmental collapse, some people should simply be allowed to die.