Viewing profile — OrbitRock

Well, the increased variability itself may be a part of the climate change. I’ll give an anecdote. I’m working on a project that tracks the length of the rainy season over time in …

> Of course, from a short-term timeline (say 100 years), the rate of species extinction from global warming will surely outpace the rate of species creation, since evolution has no…

Same here. I was a heavy smoker who struggled terribly to quit. But once I quit, well, your “pay me to drink petrol” analogy is accurate. Its been this way for about 10 years now. …

Shifting baselines syndrome

> That “cow pasture/range” chunk is largely extremely low productivity scrub land owned by the federal government and leased basically for free by cattle folk. We could convert all…

Well, there’s a tipping point of deforestation beyond which the Amazon rainforest might collapse.

I agree that we should ideally minimize our agricultural footprint and turn everything else into a nature reserve. But we’ve got to work from the realities of where we are today. C…

I disagree on the first note. The human footprint already covers nearly the entirety of the planet. Conservation of systems that are within or directly adjacent to that footprint i…

Woah, your shade map is awesome! I was playing around with it for a long time there, lol.

There’s a tool called landtrendr that sort of does this, but it’s less for visualization than for analysis of trends https://emapr.github.io/LT-GEE/index.html

Yep, but now it’s on Google Earth instead of Google Earth Engine

There’s a conservation goal that’s going around. 30 by 30. Or, 30% of the planet’s surface as protected areas by 2030. The Biden administration adopted it, but it’d be cool to see …

Yup, to me it’s fascinating. We’re another level of the fractal of life, replicating patterns seen in bacterial biofilms, slime molds, circulatory systems, nervous systems, leaves,…

A problem like a traffic jam needs systemic coordinated action though to be able to solve. Complaining about the lack of perceived ability to get everyone acting is legitimate.

We understand it but humans are composed of a variety of minds and what the rational one wants isn’t necessarily what we do. Although conservation probably has more to do with real…

Pretty sure it’s just Landsat data, which is freely available. As is Sentinel, MODIS, and a number of other satellite platforms. Google has been a pretty great pioneer on geospatia…

I’m into geospatial science, and I get so much aesthetic appreciation out of it. It is super artistic. The earth is beautiful!

There’s lots of great tools to explore such things as well. https://www.globalforestwatch.org/ https://earthenginepartners.appspot.com/science-2013-global-... I built an app which …

Great, now everybody will laugh when you try to name a variable “year”.

We really need an ñ operator

2030 is going to be a dystopia

Unless rising vapor pressure deficit undoes your gains from CO2 fertilization: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/8/eaax1396

There’s also a phenomenon that hotter conditions cause water to evaporate faster. The term here is vapor pressure deficit (VPD). VPD is the relationship between the amount of water…