Last week John Perry Barlow (co-founder of the EFF) passed away at the age of 70
Cindy Cohn at the EFF has published a memorable eulogy:
It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance.
Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity’s problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: “I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls ‘turn-key totalitarianism.’”
On my way to Oregon, apparently on Monday morning a thing in the sky is going to pass in front of another thing.
Unsurprisingly XKCD nails it, but head on over there to read the mouseover text, I am sure it perfectly describes more than a few Planet3.0 readers (and writers!). And we wouldn’t want it any other way.
The CBC’s Fifth estate devotes 1 hour to exploring the sorry state of federal science in Canada.
The link above takes you to CBC’s official page which might not work for some people outside of Canada, but thankfully someone has posted it to YouTube.
The recent approval of the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline by National Energy Board and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act review panel has brought a renewed flurry of attention to the project.
“Global warming, huh? By pure coincidence every scientist was right” Homer Simpson
At this rate Canada’s emission regulations should be ready by 2025.
Canada is once again delaying emissions regulations in the oil and gas sector, despite major pipeline projects that continue to put intense scrutiny on the energy industry’s environmental track record
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The regulations were first promised seven years ago, and Alberta has recently criticized the federal government for delays in introducing them.
From the bad-news department.
The IPCC has released a very snazzy video that summarizes the fifth assessment report.
Real Climate gives the recent methane news some proper context. The bottom line is that since methane is a short lived GHG it would take a very sudden and very massive release of methane for it to have a large effect on the climate.
A frustratingly stubborn climate myth is that global warming stopped in 1998. It hasn’t. In fact the earth is currently accumulating extra heat at a rate of 4 Hiroshima nuclear bombs per second!
A summary of the IPCC report in 4 minutes
The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.
This video taken at 6am on Friday 8 November as Typhoon Hayian hit Hernani in Eastern Samar shows how quickly and intensely the storm surge hit.
Michael Mann echoing Keven Trenberth’s position that all weather now has a climate change component since it is occurring in an altered atmosphere (one with more GHGs, heat and water vapour amongst many other factors).