- Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker (The Guardian) A story about how Riefenstahl dishonestly recast herself as an artist uninvolved with Nazi atrocities, and woman who made it her obsession to reveal the truth. The parallels to Albert Speer are rather striking.
- The Secret History of the U.S. Diplomatic Failure in Afghanistan (New Yorker) They have forgotten nothing, and they have learned nothing.
- What is ESG Investing? MSCI Ratings Focus on Corporate Bottom Line (Bloomberg) "Environmental, Social, and Governance" investing is largely just a scam.
- The new US nutrition aid strategy undermines Africa’s hungriest (Al Jazeera) This is a feature, not a bug. The US uses food aid in an attempt to enforce hegemony in staple crops.
- Built to Lie (American Prospect) A Mo Tkacik review of the Boeing expose Built to Lie. It is a portrait of a company C-Suite that has no concerns beyond their next bonus cycle.
- New York has a huge rat problem. These vigilantes with dogs think they can fix it (The Guardian) Worst hobby ever.
- Collapse of Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf by intersecting fractures. (American Geophysical Union) If the Thwaits collapses, there could be a sea level rise on the order of 3 feet.
Today in "Too Much Free Time", we have this:
1 comments :
Most of California's central valley is at or near sea level.
With a 3' increase in sea level, it will revert to swamp. (The inland port city of Stockton, immortalized in the TV series, "The Big Valley" was previously called "Tuleburg", for the cattails that grew in the swamp.)
Japanese farmers moved in and turned swamp into rice paddies. Roosevelt's concentra- I mean, Relocation Camps stole land from the Japanese farmers, and sold it cheap to cattle ranchers. Developers moved in in the 1960s, drained the paddies with a web of sloughs, and we moved to one of those developments in 1974.
This amount of sea level rise (more than three feet) will overwhelm the levees and put much of Stockton, and the valley, under water.
It's a prime agricultural area for the nation.
Salt infiltration from sea water will poison the land and turn it into a shallow inland sea within our lifetimes.
Assuming we live another 20 years.
No agriculture. No Sacramento River. No towns, from Sacramento to Bakersfield. Just hot, humid, mosquito-infested marshland. It gets over 110 degrees in summer. Add a shallow body of water to that baking sun, and you'll get crazy amounts of water evaporating and piling up against the Sierras, with nowhere to go but back down into the swamp, as runoff, and massive T-storms.
They designed the I-5 freeway as a 20' high dike to keep back the ocean, but even a small quake in that 3,000' deep sedimentary layer on the valley floor will liquefy the soil, and magnify the shaking.
We are about 100 years overdue for major quakes on the San Andreas and Hayward Faults. No dike can withstand an 8 magnitude quake on sandy, muddy soils.
(In another life, I studied California's seismic history. We used to have major quakes at 60 and 80 year intervals. By comparison, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake was a hiccup.)
There will be beachfront property in the Sierra and Coastal Range foothills, but the beaches will be toxic, from submerged gas stations, Superfund sites, and whole drowned cities on the new sea floor. River flows are not adequate to flush out toxics.
What shall we call California's new inland sea? Lake Hubris?
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