Prickly City by Scott Stantis for April 19, 2020

Wow! Scott’s talking “sustainable”!

And the point here is??

Worms off the hook!

“I can believe that a stone age man built a wooden boat large enough to house every species on Earth, but climate change just seems a bit of a stretch to me.” – Originator unknown

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Explanation: It was just another day on aerosol Earth.

For August 23, 2018, the identification and distribution of aerosols in the Earth’s atmosphere is shown in this dramatic, planet-wide digital visualization.

Produced in real time, the Goddard Earth Observing System Forward Processing (GEOS FP) model relies on a combination of Earth-observing satellite and ground-based data to calculate the presence of types of aerosols, tiny solid particles and liquid droplets, as they circulate above the entire planet.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200418.html

Microplastics are found everywhere on Earth, yet we know surprisingly little about what risks they pose to living things. Scientists are now racing to investigate some of the big unanswered questions.

Daniella Hodgson is digging a hole in the sand on a windswept beach as seabirds wheel overhead. “Found one,” she cries, flinging down her spade.

She opens her hand to reveal a wriggling lugworm. Plucked from its underground burrow, this humble creature is not unlike the proverbial canary in a coal mine.

A sentinel for plastic, the worm will ingest any particles of plastic it comes across while swallowing sand, which can then pass up the food chain to birds and fish.

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Microplastics are generally referred to as plastic smaller than 5mm, or about the size of a sesame seed.

There are many unanswered questions about the impact of these tiny bits of plastic, which come from larger plastic debris, cosmetics and clothes.

What’s not in dispute is just how far microplastics have travelled around the planet in a matter of decades.

“They’re absolutely everywhere,” says Hodgson, who is investigating how plastic is making its way into marine ecosystems.

“Microplastics can be found in the sea, in freshwater environments in rivers and lakes, in the atmosphere, in food.”

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“These microplastics are small enough to be eaten by plankton and by coral polyps and by filter-feeding mussels, but how are they bio-accumulating up the food chain?” she says.

“By the time you get to a huge fish, is that fish eating plastic itself or is it eating thousands of little fish that are eating thousands of plankton, that are eating thousands of microplastics.

“How high is the plastic signature in something like a tuna by the time it gets on your dinner plate? And that isn’t always known.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49798057

As the COVID-19 pandemic has taken hold in the United States, efforts to blunt its spread have been put into place in one state after another.

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And yet, already some are greeting these better numbers as justification to question whether the novel coronavirus was really as deadly a threat as people have been warning.

The positive effects of the aggressive tactics to slow the spread of the illness are being mistaken for a reason to question the need for those efforts in the first place.

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All of these people are wrong. Abjectly, grievously wrong. But I’m used to seeing this kind of error. It’s one I’ve seen applied to another intervention that is necessary to keep infectious disease at bay.

Among the reasons people cite for not vaccinating their kids is that we don’t even see vaccine-preventable illnesses any more.

Why take the risk to vaccinate your kids when there’s no measles or diphtheria around anyway? (That vaccine opponents grossly overstate the risks of vaccination is a separate, if related, issue.)

Of course, this mistakenly views the effect without bothering to consider the cause.

Remove the reasons for the absence of vaccine-preventable illnesses, and those illnesses will come racing back.

It’s why, for example, there were more cases of the measles in the United States last year than there had been in decades.

You can’t get the benefits of prevention without first putting the actual preventive measures in place.

You can’t see the results and ignore what it took to get them.

For an illness that may almost certainly be spread by people who are showing no symptoms themselves, the distance we are putting between each other no matter how healthy we happen to be feeling is necessary to keep positive trends going.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/coronavirus-lockdown-skeptics-and-anti-vaxxers-make-same-absurd-error

The first thing I thought was Micheal Row the Boat Ashore

If I could tell the world just one thing

It would be that we’re all ok

And not to worry because worry is wasteful

And useless in times like these

I will not be made useless

I won’t be idled with despair

I will gather myself around my faith

For light does the darkness most fear

My hands are small, I know,

But they’re not yours they are my own

But they’re not yours they are my own

And I am never broken

We will fight, not out of spite

For someone must stand up for what’s righ

Cause where there’s a man who has no voice

There ours shall go singing

My hands are small, I know,

But they’re not yours they are my own

But they’re not yours they are my own

And I am never broken

In the end only kindness matters

I will get down on my knees and I will pray

My hands are small, I know,But they’re not yours they are my ownBut they’re not yours they are my ownAnd I am never broken

We are God’s eyes God’s hands God’s mind

We are God’s eyes God’s hands God’s heart

We are God’s eyes God’s hands God’s eyes God’s hands

We are God’s hands God’s hands We are God’s hands

Jewel Kilcher

I’ve heard many a fisherman say that the catching of fish isn’t the important part of fishing, so why not?