Have you ever thought about how dinosaurs lived on a warm, swampy Earth and how we live on one that’s cold enough to keep pretty much the entirety of Greenland and Antarctica buried under kilometers-thick sheets of solid ice and wondered, hmm, how did we get from there to here? The short answer is that it took 50 million years of declining atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and dropping temperatures, not to mention building an ice sheet or two. For the longer story of the last 50 million years of climate change, including some of the reasons why, catch this episode of our podcast with Dr De La Rocha! You’ll hear about plate tectonics and continental drift, silicate weathering, carbonate sedimentation, and the spectacular effects the growth of Earth’s ice sheets have had on Earth’s climate. There are also lessons here for where anthropogenic global warming is going and whether or not its effects have permanently disrupted the climate system. Fun fact: the total amount of climate change between 50 million years ago and now dwarfs what we’re driving by burning fossil fuels, and yet, what we’re doing is more terrifying, in that it’s unfolding millions of times faster.
!!Nerd alert!! If you're interested in the primary scientific literature on the subject, these four papers are a great place to start:
-Dutkiewicz et al (2019) Sequestration and subduction of deep-sea carbonate in the global ocean since the Early Cretaceous. Geology 47:91-94.
-Müller et al (2022) Evolution of Earth’s plate tectonic conveyor belt. Nature 605:629–639.
-Rae et al (2021) Atmospheric CO2 over the last 66 million years from marine archives. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 49:609-641.
-Westerfeld et al (2020) An astronomically dated record of Earth’s climate and its predictability over the last 66 million years. Science 369: 1383–1387.
#CFP for "Symposium on Black Methods in Science, Technology, and Innovation Research in Canada and Beyond" closing today -- there's still time to submit!
Stoked for the MIgrations: ALECC 2024 Conference next week! If you're in #WaterlooRegion, come check it out!
PS: the reception snacks on the first night actually start with registration at 6:15; the library closes at 9pm so we don't have much time to hang around and eat.
Put together some promo flyers for the Honors' course The History of History that I am scheduled to teach in the fall. Because, who can say no to Dolores Huerta with a megaphone? No one can. No one, I say. 😆
you will remember that i had recently complained about “humanities commons” becoming “knowledge commons”, admitting myself first that it was kinda petty
but turns out, i was not! cos now, they are adding “AI” into the mix… that’s the last straw for me. i have asked for an account deletion
i hadn’t noticed the november update it mentions in there
We're releasing today another bonus clip from behind the Patreon paywall. This originally was produced by Christina as a bonus clip to follow the early release of S5E5; supporters on Patreon at the Companion tier and higher gain access to bonus content that is either excerpted from episodes or prompted by their content every other week. Here is the original description:
"I didn't have any extra clips from the interview with the organizers of The Solarpunk Conference. Instead, here's me (Christina) reading my contribution to The Solarpunk Conference Journal that was published after last year's conference.
Enjoy!
PS- you can catch videos of many of the presentations from the conference on The Solarpunk Conference's YouTube channel (including the presentation/panel that @arielkroon was a part of)."
Such BS...how can you do research that doesn't question whether the way accessibility is currently being offered is the problem?
This reads more like "Given that we don't want to follow legal bare minimums, how can we put the onus on disabled people & blame them when they 'fall short' as intended?"
Full recording of NORRAG-TISS-Western University panel on 'Private Sector Approaches to Education'.
I speak about the equity issues in the Global South, and a tendency to view education as a technical enterprise. I argue education is a complex and political process and systems are value-laden, requiring a critical examination of supposed resource scarcity and the roles of public and private actors.