"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

If you've been to one of them, tell me about it below.

Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept 11 attacks:

15 were from Saudi Arabia (a powerful/oil-rich country the U.S. works hard to maintain diplomatic relations with)

2 were from the United Arab Emirates (also a powerful/oil-rich country the U.S. works hard to maintain diplomatic relations with)

1 was from Egypt, 1 from Lebanon.

None of the hijackers were from Iraq.

None of the Sept 11 hijackers were Iraqi.

None of the 9/11 hijackers were from Iraq.

am i in the uk or something what is this

Seed Starting/Cold Stratification, Paw Paw Seed, Japanese Red Maple, Eastern Redbud

January 5th 2024 Seed Starting/Cold Stratification In Pennsylvania. Starting Paw Paw Seed, Japanese Red Maple, Eastern Redbud. I am also potting a fig tree cutting I was gifted and I talk about future garden plants.

We have a radar map that looks like a dragon. Hoping to get some rain out of this.

id:

a tweet by azadeh shahshahani (@ashahshahani) that says, "anticipate heightened targeting of palestinian and muslim community members by the fbi in the coming weeks.

if you live in the u.s. south and are contacted by the fbi for questioning, contact us at project south.

the national lawyers guild has a national hotline: (212) 679-2811"

end id.

hoffstrahm yuri and aihh a hoffman i guess

One thing that I think a lot of Disco Elysium meta misses (likely because a lot of it is very clearly written by young Americans writing from an intensely American-centric cultural perspective without even really realizing it) is that one of the singular and central themes of the game is massive-scale generational trauma in a home that is economically collapsing as its resources and people are being drained by an occupation.  People have noted that no one tries to help Harry, despite the fact his mental illness is incredibly obvious to everyone around him.  He tells Kim that he completely lost his memory, and Kim politely asks him to focus on the work.  He tells Gottlieb that he had a heart attack, and Gottlieb tells him that if he’s still alive it couldn’t have been that bad.  That he’ll drop dead sooner or later, but then so does everyone.

And that’s the most important thing: so does everyone.  Look at Martinaise.  Look at the world in which Harry lives.  It is not our own, but it is adjacent to ours.  More specifically, it is clearly adjacent to the states of the Eastern Bloc: overtaken and occupied by a faraway government that clearly doesn’t care about Revachol or its people.  And that is obvious in every tired face, every defeated citizen, everyone trying to eke out a little happiness or meaning in spite of the overwhelming trauma and damage around them.  The buildings are still half-destroyed.  The bullet holes are still in the walls.  The revolution was decades before, but it still feels to the people there like a fresh wound.  The number of men of Harry’s generation who are not alcoholic or otherwise deeply fucked up are very few.  Some, like Kim, hide it better, but the deeper you dig into his history, the more you realize how damaged Kim is.  He’s more than a little trigger happy, and hates that about himself, but he is a product of his environment: Kim’s entire life is seeing people he cared about shot and killed, so his instinct now is to shoot first himself, to protect those few people left who still matter to him.

Harry is not unique in his trauma.  He is a distillation of an entire culture of people who tried to rise up and make something beautiful, and were instead routed and occupied.  He is trapped between the occupation and the people on the ground, along with all the rest of the RCM.  Their authority comes from the occupying government, but it is implied that they were formed out of the remnants of the citizens militia which sprung up from Revachol itself as a way to try to mitigate some of the horrors being committed on its streets.  The Moralintern sure as hell wasn’t going to get their hands dirty, so they happily conscripted (and therefore could better control) this group, who are only recognized in certain places, and whose authority mostly amounts to giving out fines.  The RCM is corrupt, but it is corrupt in the same way its culture is.  Bribes are considered standard with them, not a moral failing, but a necessity, so long as those bribes are correctly logged as ‘donations’.  It’s how the RCM stays afloat, and the rest of Revachol completely understands that.  Everyone would take a bribe if it meant they kept eating.  Everyone would take a little under-the-table money if it meant keeping a roof over their heads.  The officersof the RCM certainly don’t make enough to see a doctor.  They have an in-house lazarus, and if he can’t fix them they just die.  Mental health care?  What mental health care?  Harry doesn’t get it for the same reason no one else does: it doesn’t really seem to exist.  There are no counselors, no psychologists, no psychiatrists.  How would they even start?  If the world is what is broken, if everyone is suffering a similar catastrophic amount, it makes sense that Harry’s trauma would simply get rolled up with all the rest.  Kim asks him to get on with the job because Harry’s suffering is not remarkable in Revachol.  He is one of an entire generation who have an astronomical number of orphans from the revolution, and so many younger people are left more or less orphans as their parents drink themselves into oblivion like Cuno’s father.  So Harry’s truly unique attribute is embodying all that trauma, having it all inside of him, filling him to bursting.

To really engage with the themes of the game, engaging first and foremost with the reality of Revachol is imperative.  Imposing our own reality onto Revachol, particularly if coming from an American perspective (which tend to have the habit of both viewing the world through an American lens and not realizing they’re doing it because they’ve never experienced a different lens), will always feel shallow to me because of this.

All that is to say, I would love to hear some more explicitly European meta about this game, and especially Eastern European meta.  If anyone can point me to some good, juicy essays from that perspective, I would be grateful!

Eastern European games inspired by this post.

✨☦️ A μ o γ o ς ☦️✨

😇🙏 😇🙏 😇🙏 😇🙏

[source]

These fucking idiots (affectionate)

Indian Steps Museum located in Airville, York Pennsylvania

Learn about Native American Culture in York and Lancaster Pennsylvania Indian Steps Museum located in Airville, York Pennsylvania

serenno and mandalore being in the same neighborhood entertains me greatly as an enjoyer of worldbuilding like

mandalorians are based on multiple historical seafaring peoples. and they're a fairly aggressive warrior culture for the most part, too. surely they fucked with the planets around them. surely they raided and pillaged a little, or maybe even settled.

what i'm getting at is i think it would be funny if serennian and mandalorian royalty were related and count dooku is, idk, satine's 28th cousin thrice removed and will casually drop that in a conversation (and it's not like that's a huge leap of logic either bc all royals are related anyway)

Hi. I just had an idea about temporally misplaced Danyal Al Ghul.

Clockwork yoinked him after he was seriously injured and patched him up. Basically saved him. And then yeeted him to the past to be adopted by the Fentons.

So by the time Danny and Damian have a reunion Danny is in his late 20s at most, early 20s at the very least. And he is most definitely a shapeshifting magical eastern dragon with a cult and all that.

I do not make anything having to do with Danny being related to the Al Ghuls.

However

This gives me the foundation to do such a thing.

Alright, so we would need to find a reason why Clockwork would even want to help Danny in any sort of capacity since he wasn't being pushed to kill him because of the observants.

But what if the reason was because he needed someone to beat some sense into (and I am both sorry and not at all sorry for this) his husband turned tyrant turned sleeper soon into the future. Since in a few timelines Danny does beat Pariah Dark he just, decided to push him onto that path.

The perfect opportunity presented itself when Danny was heavily injured in a battle between brothers to decide the true heir, to which both was heavily injured actually, and yoinked him away, patched him up, and left it to the LoA to assume he was just dead after his body disappeared.

So then, following the timeline he foresees where he fought against Pariah, gently and carefully guided him along the timestream (For which to prevent the notice of other Masters of times) to a few years prior and landed him in the care of the Fentons.

Over the years he did gently nudge things here and there to have the Fenton's views on ghosts changing slowly, but surely, as thanks to the boy for unknowingly helping him.

Oh, and avoiding a disastrous future, he guesses.

Everything followed along with his plan, slowly coming to fruition until the boy knocked some sense into his husband, to which made him the new king of the Ghost Zone after the Observants deemed Pariah unfit to rule beyond this point anymore, and as a boon because he was unable to have the Crown and ring in Pariah's possession (given to Clockwork to watch over, so as to not have a repeat of Pariah Dark), he was granted the ability to turn into an eastern dragon at will.

Occasionally he sent the boy back into the past to right some wrongs, avoid disaster, and to occasionally collect the soon-to-be Duke after he found himself in the past. Though he does find himself (and his husband) amused at seeing the boy slowly having a cult built in his name.

Danny's honestly been living the good life, no longer being expected to succeed the League of Assassins and leaving it up to his twin, he was adopted by a new family who, while a bit eccentric was amusing nonetheless, and they did become a true, proper family after his reveal went exceedingly well!

He was 25 now, and decided to take a break from both his kingly duties, and Amity Park, his parents pushed him to take this as a well-deserved vacation and, since Jazz was also in Gotham, he could drop by and say hi to her!

Danny was a bit miffed about leaving the inner-workings of the Ghost Zone to Vlad, more so that it's him than anything. But he did at the very least trust the Duke's skill in making everything go as smoothly as possible and having him consumed in paperwork would stop his brooding over being unable to find that guy, he had a one-nighter with.

(He's honestly surprised anyone would do that, but he guesses people have... interesting tastes. Also, a brooding phoenix, to his displeasure, was far worse than a phoenix trying to woo his mother.)

So he stopped by Gotham, said hi to sister and decided to crash at her place for a while. Wandered around Gotham, seeing the sights, tasting the food, talking to people.

A very good vacation, in his books.

So now what was he supposed to do, when he found his vacation interrupted by what was undoubtedly his twin along with the goddamn Wayne's showing up in his sister's apartment.

They gave him a jumpscare of a lifetime, honestly. But also couldn't they do this somewhere else? Like, a coffee shop, perhaps?