What scientists are projecting will happen to the Thwaites Glacier in the next three to five years should be front page news everywhere today.
Short thread.
The Thwaites Glacier (roughly the size of Britain) is mostly held in place by a massive shelf of ice that slows its flow in to the sea.
That ice shelf is like a chair jammed under a door handle. But now it is beginning to slip allowing the door to open.

Warmer waters are effectively melting the ice from underneath as this @nytimes graphic illustrates.
The shelf is getting thinner and losing its anchor on the sea bed. New analysis shows it is fracturing like a window and will in time shatter in to smaller icebergs.

This won’t cause disastrous sea level rise. The shelf displaces roughly the same amount of sea solid or liquid.
It is what it is holding behind the door that matters. If the entire Thwaites glacier slid in to the ocean it would cause 65cm sea level rise.
But if that happens the entire Western Antarctic shelf could also destabilise. The projected rise in that scenario is incomprehensible.
The authors of this report include a very readable plain English summary for the non glaciologists. It demands your attention. agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meeti…

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More from @boucherhayes

29 Nov
47% Irish people against nuclear power. 25% in favour.

@AmarachResearch ran a poll of 1600 people prompted by this evening’s Hot Mess on @RTERadio1

We posed a number of questions 1/ Image
Q1: Should Ireland consider nuclear energy to achieve its climate change targets?

Yes: 31%
No: 42% Image
Q2: Should the govt concentrate on developing renewable sources of energy and leave the legislative ban on nuclear power in place?

Yes: 58%
No: 21% Image
Read 7 tweets
29 Apr 20
This story sent me down a late night research rabbit hole wondering how quarantines were enforced during the Black Death. A lot of it is still the same five centuries later.

Thread

itv.com/news/anglia/20…
In Damascus at the start of the 8th century the Arab world had already come up with an embryonic form of hospital.
They then had the good sense to build entirely separate units for the treatment of leprosy.
14th century Venetians isolated sailors on an island in the lagoon.

They hit on thirty days to see if they displayed symptoms, but then upped it to the more biblically pleasing 40 days.

40-> quarant-> Quarantine
Read 7 tweets
21 Feb 20
What the hell is happening to Britain?

I have been travelling to London since the eighties but I have never come across the volume and depth of despair as presently.
It has taken me until now to process something I saw on The Tube yesterday.

A man begging, reduced to involuntarily howling in exhausted anguish. Met with everything from indifference to anger.
From halfway down the carriage I could see straight away he’d been sleeping rough. But for days or weeks, not months. Only recently slipped between the cracks. He was steeling himself to say something, but the bowed heads and turned shoulders were putting him off.
Read 9 tweets
1 Nov 19
Dublin tech bro heading to Lisbon for Web Summit is putting his best moves on a Brazilian girl in the row behind me. This is very thread-worthy.
In fact this is worthy of a title:

Missed connections: A possible explanation of why the tech-bro’s failed chat up routine led to species extinction.
Him: So you’re from Brazil, you’re definitely going to have to go through immigration control. I don’t because we’re in the EU. Do you know the EU?

Her: Brazilian passport holders don’t require visas for Portugal.
Read 23 tweets
27 Mar 19
The Brexiteer who launched a thousand #HannanIrishHistory tweets also dabbled in futurology. Daniel Hannan’s wrote this prediction for a glorious Brexit just before the referendum
I’ll just leave these excerpts here.
Read 7 tweets
26 Feb 19
History and Geography were dropped as core subjects in Britain. Only 40% now study it at GCSE (junior cycle).

It’s a bit of a leap from there to #Brexit but it must be part of the background picture.
History is compulsory in Britain only up until age 14. The most recent figure I can find from 2009 suggests only 4% sat a History GCSE exam. Making it less popular than Design & Technology.
It is even less popular at A Level. More students sat the Psychology paper than History.

The even bigger problem though is “this sceptered isle” approach to History. It’s all Agincourt, Cromwell and Spitfires.
Read 11 tweets

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