what we need is a renewable energy solution that harnesses the murderous instincts of the housecat
Outfit a cat in a vest covered with high powered magnets and place them in a cylinder containing a stator and project a laser pointer dot around the wall of the cylinder to produce DC via fleet footed felines.
No matter where you go...there you are. ~ Buckaroo Banzai
Humans don't enjoy living with wild predators big enough to eat feral cats because that means they tend to eat pet cats, small dogs, farm animals, and occasionally toddlers.
An aside on the coyote thing, for all the bad publicity coyotes get, there have been relatively few actual coyote attacks on humans, even children, only ever 2 fatalities (which puts them right up there with chickens as far as deadliness), and its arguable whether a coyote is even as much of a threat to humans as a large stray or unfamiliar domestic dog.
So anyone thinking of buying an AR and going off to fight against the oncoming coyote apocalypse maybe hold off, if anything they generally do more good than harm.
An aside on the coyote thing, for all the bad publicity coyotes get, there have been relatively few actual coyote attacks on humans, even children, only ever 2 fatalities (which puts them right up there with chickens as far as deadliness), and its arguable whether a coyote is even as much of a threat to humans as a large stray or unfamiliar domestic dog.
So anyone thinking of buying an AR and going off to fight against the oncoming coyote apocalypse maybe hold off, if anything they generally do more good than harm.
OK, but are there any other cute, small animals I can indiscriminately murder for fun vaguely envirnomental reasons?
An aside on the coyote thing, for all the bad publicity coyotes get, there have been relatively few actual coyote attacks on humans, even children, only ever 2 fatalities (which puts them right up there with chickens as far as deadliness), and its arguable whether a coyote is even as much of a threat to humans as a large stray or unfamiliar domestic dog.
So anyone thinking of buying an AR and going off to fight against the oncoming coyote apocalypse maybe hold off, if anything they generally do more good than harm.
OK, but are there any other cute, small animals I can indiscriminately murder for fun vaguely envirnomental reasons?
An aside on the coyote thing, for all the bad publicity coyotes get, there have been relatively few actual coyote attacks on humans, even children, only ever 2 fatalities (which puts them right up there with chickens as far as deadliness), and its arguable whether a coyote is even as much of a threat to humans as a large stray or unfamiliar domestic dog.
So anyone thinking of buying an AR and going off to fight against the oncoming coyote apocalypse maybe hold off, if anything they generally do more good than harm.
OK, but are there any other cute, small animals I can indiscriminately murder for fun vaguely envirnomental reasons?
An aside on the coyote thing, for all the bad publicity coyotes get, there have been relatively few actual coyote attacks on humans, even children, only ever 2 fatalities (which puts them right up there with chickens as far as deadliness), and its arguable whether a coyote is even as much of a threat to humans as a large stray or unfamiliar domestic dog.
So anyone thinking of buying an AR and going off to fight against the oncoming coyote apocalypse maybe hold off, if anything they generally do more good than harm.
OK, but are there any other cute, small animals I can indiscriminately murder for fun vaguely envirnomental reasons?
So if we really wanted to save birds we could employ people to catch and neuter feral cats but that would cost money, so Republicans are never going to be in favor of it.
Why not just shoot the feral cats?
Hire some cat catchers and then euthanize them if nobody adopts them. Which is basically how I think it works now? At least in areas that bother to control feral animals.
We don't generally euthanize the people working in animal control, no. Interesting incentive structure though.
Maybe euthanize owners who don't neuter their cats? But then you get neighborhoods like mine where nobody "owns" the cats but they feed them.
Also, on cat kills - feral cats need to eat more than once a month. Breeding feral cats even moreso. Urban birds have territories where they regularly find food from humans and thus feral cats have popular hunting grounds with easy prey. The birds that don't get ganked reproduce like mad because there's always food available.
Domestic cats are generally well fed so they hunt for sport. Depending on the temperament of the cat those numbers can vary wildly. My current indoor/outdoor orange tabby is a powerful muscular chonker. He goes and flops on his back in the yard because he thinks the squirrels are his friends and they come caper up to him on a dare before running off. A cricket once defeated him in battle. He has zero apparent inclination to kill.
The cat I owned before him depopulated a quarter mile radius of woodland of everything smaller than deer and most every bird that ate things off the ground. We found dead voles for months before the corpses stopped appearing - apparently there were no more voles. He may have killed the local raccoon gang or they may have all relocated after my cat took away their favorite food spots, it is unclear. He liked to stalk deer herds and he must have made a grab for a fawn at some point because you could see the herd always had two adults watching him whenever he was outside.
He always came home promptly at 6pm for dinner. Cats are an ecological disaster. They're sooo fluffy and cute! The only things cuter are members of the weasel family and those things wreak even more havoc than cats because weasels will eat eggs
So if we really wanted to save birds we could employ people to catch and neuter feral cats but that would cost money, so Republicans are never going to be in favor of it.
Why not just shoot the feral cats?
Hire some cat catchers and then euthanize them if nobody adopts them. Which is basically how I think it works now? At least in areas that bother to control feral animals.
We don't generally euthanize the people working in animal control, no. Interesting incentive structure though.
Maybe euthanize owners who don't neuter their cats? But then you get neighborhoods like mine where nobody "owns" the cats but they feed them.
Also, on cat kills - feral cats need to eat more than once a month. Breeding feral cats even moreso. Urban birds have territories where they regularly find food from humans and thus feral cats have popular hunting grounds with easy prey. The birds that don't get ganked reproduce like mad because there's always food available.
Domestic cats are generally well fed so they hunt for sport. Depending on the temperament of the cat those numbers can vary wildly. My current indoor/outdoor orange tabby is a powerful muscular chonker. He goes and flops on his back in the yard because he thinks the squirrels are his friends and they come caper up to him on a dare before running off. A cricket once defeated him in battle. He has zero apparent inclination to kill.
The cat I owned before him depopulated a quarter mile radius of woodland of everything smaller than deer and most every bird that ate things off the ground. We found dead voles for months before the corpses stopped appearing - apparently there were no more voles. He may have killed the local raccoon gang or they may have all relocated after my cat took away their favorite food spots, it is unclear. He liked to stalk deer herds and he must have made a grab for a fawn at some point because you could see the herd always had two adults watching him whenever he was outside.
He always came home promptly at 6pm for dinner. Cats are an ecological disaster. They're sooo fluffy and cute! The only things cuter are members of the weasel family and those things wreak even more havoc than cats because weasels will eat eggs
I can assure you cats eat eggs.
Nothing like the sight of my extremely overweight black cat (r.i.p) struggling to get down a tree with an egg in its mouth.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
Weasels are basically just adorable caffeinated teeth.
I had an indoor/ outdoor cat as a kid and he killed birds all the time. I used to hide behind the bushes in front of my house for hide and seek until the time I looked down and saw all the skeletons.
Also the only time I ever saw a wild rabbit in Dallas was when he left it on our back porch.
RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Also wildly off topic, but when my parents moved they took that cat from the woods of North Carolina to an apartment complex in the middle of Phoenix, Arizona. The complex had a feral.cat colony of about 30 cats. My little murderball beat up every cat in the colony over the course of a month prompting a dramatic change in the behavior of the feral cats. They no longer moved anywhere in the complex alone. Cats were now venturing forth in pairs to groups of five, and you wouldn't see any cats sunning themselves without others on watch.
And when my murderfloof walked through an area, the ferals would abandon it in good order. Apparently they had learned that their instincts to just "scatter" would get at least one of them attacked so now they retreated together. I was so proud
I had a cat who loved to hunt, but kill or even injure was only for if a new toy hurt itself too badly to continue being a toy. Mice? He'd bring them inside, let em loose without a scratch, and give chase. They often survived because eventually one of us would capture the mouse and put it outside. Birds? They were the usual victims, because he brought them underneath the kitchen table before releasing them, and a bird's first instinct is to fly...straight into the table, again and again as each injury compounded into the fear and attempts at flight until they had broken themselves.
However, this didn't work on pigeons. When he brought one in we came home to see it cooing and waddling around while being prodded by the cat.
Find someone that does outreach to attempt to care for ferals and you might be amazed at just how many there are. I met someone doing it when looking for one of our cats that got out of the house. Never really saw many strays in our town, but the lady put some food out and it was unnerving just how many there were. She'd catch, spay/neuter, release as much as she could but the sheer amount was overwhelming.
Yeah, there are a ton. In part because they are just really adapted to urban and suburban life, in part because due to the great predator extermination campaigns of the 1800s aside from the coyote there are both little competition and little predation for them so they just go wild in their niche.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Cats are automatically aware when you want them to do something and they refuse to do it. As soon as you come up with a foolproof cat powered generator every cat you put in it will utterly fail to cat.
what we need is a renewable energy solution that harnesses the murderous instincts of the housecat
Outfit a cat in a vest covered with high powered magnets and place them in a cylinder containing a stator and project a laser pointer dot around the wall of the cylinder to produce DC via fleet footed felines.
Cat will instantly lose interest in lasers and sleep in the cylinder. As soon as you open the door it will dash out and tear up and down the hallway for ten minutes.
what we need is a renewable energy solution that harnesses the murderous instincts of the housecat
Housecat with a piece of buttered toast strapped to its back. Toss into a generator, it spins infinitely.
Yes, we've all seen the video.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
edited February 2020
Back on topic, some scientists calculated an easy way to mitigate 60-80% of the effects of plane contrails on the environment: slightly change the altitudes of 1.7-2.0% of flights, the few that are most likely to create long-lasting contrail cirrus clouds that have a strong greenhouse effect, so that they don't create those clouds. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and certain types of clouds, such as these contrail cirrus ones, trap far more heat than they reflect sunlight back.
The effects of these clouds can be significant. During the three days after Sept. 11 when there were no domestic flights allowed over the continental US, nighttime temperatures dropped by an average 1 degree F. Over half that effect could be eliminated with a tiny change. (We'll see if anyone actually does it, though.)
Back on topic, some scientists calculated an easy way to mitigate 60-80% of the effects of plane contrails on the environment: slightly change the altitudes of 1.7-2.0% of flights, the few that are most likely to create long-lasting contrail cirrus clouds that have a strong greenhouse effect, so that they don't create those clouds. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and certain types of clouds, such as these contrail cirrus ones, trap far more heat than they reflect sunlight back.
The effects of these clouds can be significant. During the three days after Sept. 11 when there were no domestic flights allowed over the continental US, nighttime temperatures dropped by an average 1 degree F. Over half that effect could be eliminated with a tiny change. (We'll see if anyone actually does it, though.)
I can't actually tell from the article, can they actually identify which flight that is in advance?
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Back on topic, some scientists calculated an easy way to mitigate 60-80% of the effects of plane contrails on the environment: slightly change the altitudes of 1.7-2.0% of flights, the few that are most likely to create long-lasting contrail cirrus clouds that have a strong greenhouse effect, so that they don't create those clouds. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and certain types of clouds, such as these contrail cirrus ones, trap far more heat than they reflect sunlight back.
The effects of these clouds can be significant. During the three days after Sept. 11 when there were no domestic flights allowed over the continental US, nighttime temperatures dropped by an average 1 degree F. Over half that effect could be eliminated with a tiny change. (We'll see if anyone actually does it, though.)
I can't actually tell from the article, can they actually identify which flight that is in advance?
Yes, by monitoring relative humidity at flight altitude. There is water in jet exhaust*, when that water increases relative humidity to 100% you get a contrail. When that happens below 0C, you get a persistent contrail.
*-fossil fuels are mostly hydrogen and carbon. Burning them with atmospheric oxygen yields both carbon and hydrogen oxides, mostly CO2 and water.
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Scientists: Contrails actually can be harmful!
Chemtrail Paranoids: Fake news!
A play in two acts, entitled The World's Only Superpower
Back on topic, some scientists calculated an easy way to mitigate 60-80% of the effects of plane contrails on the environment: slightly change the altitudes of 1.7-2.0% of flights, the few that are most likely to create long-lasting contrail cirrus clouds that have a strong greenhouse effect, so that they don't create those clouds. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas and certain types of clouds, such as these contrail cirrus ones, trap far more heat than they reflect sunlight back.
The effects of these clouds can be significant. During the three days after Sept. 11 when there were no domestic flights allowed over the continental US, nighttime temperatures dropped by an average 1 degree F. Over half that effect could be eliminated with a tiny change. (We'll see if anyone actually does it, though.)
The article linked states that a large amount of the visible contrail could be eliminated, but I didn't see any citations regarding how much contrails contribute to environmental damage. It also terribly misrepresents some of the data, by conflating contrail effects with pure emissions, such as:
Science News Article: More efficient aircraft engines will have to be part of the solution, too, the authors on this study say. In fact, combining cleaner-burning planes with their altitude-adjusting methods could lead to an emissions reduction as high as 92 percent, they say.
Actual paper: In the longer term, widespread use of new engine combustor technology, which reduces BC particle emissions, could achieve a 68.8% [45.2, 82.1%] reduction in the contrail Energy Focusing (EF). A combination of both interventions could reduce the contrail EF by 91.8% [88.6, 95.8%].
There's no magic bullet simple solution to aircraft pollution or environmental damage and this article acts like there is. It's nothing but science news sensationalism.
Ski seasons are getting shorter
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is well aware of the problem. In a report examining the impact of climate change on future winter games, the committee warned that as temperatures increase, the snowline will rise, meaning fewer places around the world will be suitable for skiing and other winter sports.
The IOC report forecast that an increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) would push the snowline up by 150 meters. "The ski season may start up to a month later and finish up to three months earlier," the committee said.
According to NASA, global temperatures are now 0.98 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1951-1980 mean. The impact of this warming on snow depth is already noticeable.
When scientists from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute looked at snow depth data from 1,131 weather stations across Europe, they found that, on average, mean snow depth had decreased by more than 12% a decade over the past 66 years.
The IOC said warming temperatures were particularly bad news for ski resorts located below altitudes of 1,000 meters.
Nove Mesto, which lies just 600 meters above sea level, is a prime example of this.
A couple of years ago, the city realized that local snow conditions there were too unpredictable for a place that wanted to host major winter sports competitions, so it built a giant snow storage facility.
It takes about 1million liters (a little over 264,000 gallons) to cover a single hectare (100m x 100m), and just the snow making machines at ski resorts in the alps use the same energy as a small city with about 130,000 people.
Get your skiing in now while you still can.
Edit: A reminder about water and volume: 1million liters of water in a 100m x 100m area would have a depth of 100cm (a little more than 3.25 feet).
We can't eliminate contrails for one incredibly stupid reason. It would (in their minds) 110% vindicate all the conspiracy theorists and we'd NEVER get any logical things done in the world again.
We can't eliminate contrails for one incredibly stupid reason. It would (in their minds) 110% vindicate all the conspiracy theorists and we'd NEVER get any logical things done in the world again.
"Conspirators find a way to make contrails with transparent gas."
"President Trump: "[The Mexican border is] not known for cold weather. It's known for quite hot weather. You don't have too much snow in this area, right?... If you had any, that would be called climate change, I think, right? When they do that, I'm there, I'm a believer.""
- The Hill is a conservative political newspaper.
So, I'm glad the President is now on board, and a believer in climate change, and that any reversal will be seen as being in bad faith, as evidence that the man is a deeply stupid, utterly untrustworthy, or both.
The southern US is known for cold weather, snow, and even temperatures as low as 0F. They don't have weeks at a time of it like the north, but the gulf states and most of Texas used to average 10-20 days below freezing a year.
It's not the fact that there IS snow that shows climate change, it's the fact that it has become so rare that even one day of it is national news.
The southern US is known for cold weather, snow, and even temperatures as low as 0F. They don't have weeks at a time of it like the north, but the gulf states and most of Texas used to average 10-20 days below freezing a year.
It's not the fact that there IS snow that shows climate change, it's the fact that it has become so rare that even one day of it is national news.
Uh, no?
It's a thing that happens occasionally but it is absolutely not something the southern US is "known" for.
The original ACIS/CC article is gone but a few of the images are still on the server and indexed by GIS. Until the 80's, the gulf coast averaged 5-10 days per year below 0F, and Texas in general had wider extremes both cold and hot. Parts of the Texas border averaged over 20" of snowfall in the 70's while less than 1" in the 2010's.
This is a widespread understanding problem because most people alive right now have never actually experienced an average winter or summer in their adult lives. Michigan had one of its worst cold snaps since the 90's, but from 1900-1950 its daily average in January was colder, let alone its cold snaps.
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TraceGNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered Userregular
20 inches averaged out over a decade does not make it a common occurrence. The fact that it's even less common now absolutely is proof of global climate change though.
If you really want to see how an area that was known for getting blasted with snow and cold every winter, look up the changes in New England. I think I've had a total of three or four days where we got even close to zero.
I grew up in Dallas, 100s of miles north of the border and twice in the 18 years i lived there was there enough snow to make a snow man. Once required the snow from multiple houses.
Posts
what we need is a renewable energy solution that harnesses the murderous instincts of the housecat
Outfit a cat in a vest covered with high powered magnets and place them in a cylinder containing a stator and project a laser pointer dot around the wall of the cylinder to produce DC via fleet footed felines.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
I mean we do it’s called “a functioning ecosystem”
So anyone thinking of buying an AR and going off to fight against the oncoming coyote apocalypse maybe hold off, if anything they generally do more good than harm.
OK, but are there any other cute, small animals I can indiscriminately murder for fun vaguely envirnomental reasons?
Bunnies.
Rabbit season!
Duck season!
We don't generally euthanize the people working in animal control, no. Interesting incentive structure though.
Maybe euthanize owners who don't neuter their cats? But then you get neighborhoods like mine where nobody "owns" the cats but they feed them.
Also, on cat kills - feral cats need to eat more than once a month. Breeding feral cats even moreso. Urban birds have territories where they regularly find food from humans and thus feral cats have popular hunting grounds with easy prey. The birds that don't get ganked reproduce like mad because there's always food available.
Domestic cats are generally well fed so they hunt for sport. Depending on the temperament of the cat those numbers can vary wildly. My current indoor/outdoor orange tabby is a powerful muscular chonker. He goes and flops on his back in the yard because he thinks the squirrels are his friends and they come caper up to him on a dare before running off. A cricket once defeated him in battle. He has zero apparent inclination to kill.
The cat I owned before him depopulated a quarter mile radius of woodland of everything smaller than deer and most every bird that ate things off the ground. We found dead voles for months before the corpses stopped appearing - apparently there were no more voles. He may have killed the local raccoon gang or they may have all relocated after my cat took away their favorite food spots, it is unclear. He liked to stalk deer herds and he must have made a grab for a fawn at some point because you could see the herd always had two adults watching him whenever he was outside.
He always came home promptly at 6pm for dinner. Cats are an ecological disaster. They're sooo fluffy and cute! The only things cuter are members of the weasel family and those things wreak even more havoc than cats because weasels will eat eggs
I can assure you cats eat eggs.
Nothing like the sight of my extremely overweight black cat (r.i.p) struggling to get down a tree with an egg in its mouth.
I had an indoor/ outdoor cat as a kid and he killed birds all the time. I used to hide behind the bushes in front of my house for hide and seek until the time I looked down and saw all the skeletons.
Also the only time I ever saw a wild rabbit in Dallas was when he left it on our back porch.
An extravagant, but ultimately unwanted gift.
And when my murderfloof walked through an area, the ferals would abandon it in good order. Apparently they had learned that their instincts to just "scatter" would get at least one of them attacked so now they retreated together. I was so proud
My cat had learned to herd cats
However, this didn't work on pigeons. When he brought one in we came home to see it cooing and waddling around while being prodded by the cat.
Housecat with a piece of buttered toast strapped to its back. Toss into a generator, it spins infinitely.
This idea:
Cat will instantly lose interest in lasers and sleep in the cylinder. As soon as you open the door it will dash out and tear up and down the hallway for ten minutes.
This one:
Cat will land on its back and hurt itself repeatedly just out of spite.
Two housecats strapped back to back. Twice as many cats removed from the population, no toast wasted.
Yes, we've all seen the video.
The effects of these clouds can be significant. During the three days after Sept. 11 when there were no domestic flights allowed over the continental US, nighttime temperatures dropped by an average 1 degree F. Over half that effect could be eliminated with a tiny change. (We'll see if anyone actually does it, though.)
I can't actually tell from the article, can they actually identify which flight that is in advance?
Yes, by monitoring relative humidity at flight altitude. There is water in jet exhaust*, when that water increases relative humidity to 100% you get a contrail. When that happens below 0C, you get a persistent contrail.
*-fossil fuels are mostly hydrogen and carbon. Burning them with atmospheric oxygen yields both carbon and hydrogen oxides, mostly CO2 and water.
Chemtrail Paranoids: Fake news!
A play in two acts, entitled The World's Only Superpower
The article linked states that a large amount of the visible contrail could be eliminated, but I didn't see any citations regarding how much contrails contribute to environmental damage. It also terribly misrepresents some of the data, by conflating contrail effects with pure emissions, such as:
There's no magic bullet simple solution to aircraft pollution or environmental damage and this article acts like there is. It's nothing but science news sensationalism.
It takes about 1million liters (a little over 264,000 gallons) to cover a single hectare (100m x 100m), and just the snow making machines at ski resorts in the alps use the same energy as a small city with about 130,000 people.
Get your skiing in now while you still can.
Edit: A reminder about water and volume: 1million liters of water in a 100m x 100m area would have a depth of 100cm (a little more than 3.25 feet).
"Conspirators find a way to make contrails with transparent gas."
What if
Cat genophage.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
"President Trump: "[The Mexican border is] not known for cold weather. It's known for quite hot weather. You don't have too much snow in this area, right?... If you had any, that would be called climate change, I think, right? When they do that, I'm there, I'm a believer.""
- The Hill is a conservative political newspaper.
https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/2020/02/05/juarez-weather-snow-clear-us-mexico-border-crossings/4665973002/
"As snow blankets Juárez, commuters cheer clear U.S.-Mexico border crossings"
- El Paso Times is a newspaper for the El Paso, Texas, and is a sister city to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on the border.
So, I'm glad the President is now on board, and a believer in climate change, and that any reversal will be seen as being in bad faith, as evidence that the man is a deeply stupid, utterly untrustworthy, or both.
Hint, it's both.
And yet his cult will cheer.
It's not the fact that there IS snow that shows climate change, it's the fact that it has become so rare that even one day of it is national news.
Uh, no?
It's a thing that happens occasionally but it is absolutely not something the southern US is "known" for.
The original ACIS/CC article is gone but a few of the images are still on the server and indexed by GIS. Until the 80's, the gulf coast averaged 5-10 days per year below 0F, and Texas in general had wider extremes both cold and hot. Parts of the Texas border averaged over 20" of snowfall in the 70's while less than 1" in the 2010's.
This is a widespread understanding problem because most people alive right now have never actually experienced an average winter or summer in their adult lives. Michigan had one of its worst cold snaps since the 90's, but from 1900-1950 its daily average in January was colder, let alone its cold snaps.
If you really want to see how an area that was known for getting blasted with snow and cold every winter, look up the changes in New England. I think I've had a total of three or four days where we got even close to zero.