1. The shock of 2020: we learned a pandemic can strike US out of the blue.
We worried climate would lose the little salience we'd won in 2019 and worked unpaid overtime for months/years to link both to deeper socioeconomic problem structures.
2. The shock of 2021 was Omicron: we learned how eagerly people dismissed it.
Spoiler: we then pissed away one year telling ourselves it was "mild", "a natural vaccine", "we were lucky"; rather than taking preparations for SARS eradication, which would work just like in 2003.
3. The surprise of 2022 was seeing the last #ZeroCovid countries like New Zealand, Taiwan and China remove protections even though they everyone who was remotely interested and science-literate knew what would happen.
“Bamboo is our best chance to slow climate breakdown. It can replace drivers of GHG emissions and biodiversity loss (food, construction, concrete, plastic), build soil & allow regrowing rainforest." - Let's test it. Grow bamboo as blueprint for a future ecological civilization 🧵
2. Giant bamboo dwarfs trees. As grass, it grows 30 times (!) faster and can be harvested every year. Timber takes decades; too slow. Stunningly, no one in the west described the unique climate mitigation potential of bamboo yet. - Note the rhizome system:
3. Climate relevant will be the use in millions of ha of plantations, just like other economically important crops. After two months on this, some significant progress: air pot kindly donated 1 m of their professional U system, so I can test it for bamboo.
SARS-CoV-2 reminder: The more immune compromised the population, the less symptoms, the ‘milder’ it appears, the more severe it really is (=Long Covid, long term damage). That’s what even most scientists seem not to get
Thanks for vivid discussion everyone. It really is a fundamentally important point. Since I deleted most references for lack of structure (and frankly, just being fed up repeating the same points for 3 to 4 years), I'll look for new references that must have been published by now
1. "Bamboo is our best chance to slow climate breakdown: it sustains societies, can protect soil and store carbon for 100 years in food, construction, bio-concrete and plastic." - Let’s test this. As our very German neighbors renew their English Gardens, we start growing bamboo👇
2. Three months ago I started on bamboo: no one else in Europe seemed to have systematically analyzed or even considered its global climate mitigation potential when used as agricultural crop rather than natural forests, which do little climate mitigation.
3. A bamboo focus isn't for the coming years. We are at least a decade early. However, since getting started will take decades, now is a good time. In 10 years, atmospheric CO2 will exceed 450 ppm. That's enough to fundamentally transform the Earth system.
Hybrid immunity was invented in 2021 to sell the idea of SARS-CoV-2 infections as a good. There is no literature pre 2021. The idea to infect the global population with a SARS virus, including all 2 billion children aged 14 yo and younger, didn't exist. scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22h…
You can repeat the same with "immune debt" or "immunity debt", the original flawed idea invented by French pediatrician Cohen in 2021, setting off the whole strain of argument. An incredibly effective PR campaign, less good science. scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&…
1. Europe imports all its bamboo. Plantations on fallow land are one good option to slow climate breakdown and create sustainable jobs. Bamboo is incredibly fast and, unlike timber, active management improves climate and ecological outcomes. Merits focus, baustoff-partner.de/d/moso-reiche-…
SARS-CoV-2 wasn't the last disruption to import based businesses. Our basic climate policy warning for seven years now. One of the reasons I'd encourage everyone to look into starting to grow Moso bamboo (phyllostachys edulis) or other suitable species in Southern Europe as well.
3. Terrestrial mammals and C4 grasses evolved and adapted below a threshold of 550 ppm. Earth will cross it within the lifetime of kids born today. - Bamboo is our most efficient C3 plant. Cenozoic CO2 proxy (CENCO2PIP) Consortium☝️ science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
You need a scale for the collapse of 'doomsday' glacier Thwaites. Compare the past two years: iceberg B22a broke off the glacier in 2002 and gained legs in 2023, freeing Thwaites to flow into the sea over the coming years: here it is today—that's 3,000 km2 worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=-2442135.48…
3600 square kilometers, for the mathematicians here