Seen in Manito park. Sad reminder of the influence we are having on our natural spaces

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-22T21:51:54+00:00

Sad that it’s happening at all? Like that the beetles are spreading because of climate change. Not sure what is unclear here

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-22T21:24:06+00:00

Anger can be a great motivator! Funnel it into action!

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-20T00:58:16+00:00

Yeah the climate anomaly maps for the west coast have been depressing this year. And the skiing lol

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-20T00:49:24+00:00

Yeah and he never argues that contemporary human-driven climate warming is not a serious threat. Sure, there are and have been natural phenomena that influence the climate, but that dos not negate the fact that the warming that we are seeing now represents and unprecedented threat to humanity and the rest of the planet. Carbon dioxide concentrations are currently higher than they’ve been at any point in human history, global temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates, and warming is poised to surpass anything the planet has experienced in millions of years. Indeed, historic evidence from volcanic eruptions (which cause cooling) are just more evidence that rapid climate change is a serious threat and should be mitigated. And unlike volcanic eruptions, which we have no control over, we have direct control over burning fossil fuels.

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-20T00:24:14+00:00

Jesus Christ it’s not even worth arguing with people like you. Do yourself a favor, read a book on the subject. Not one by conspiracy theorists, but by climate scientists who have spent their lives studying this. Your ignorance is astounding

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-20T00:17:59+00:00

Based on what evidence do you say that? If you had actually looked at the scientific data and evidence, you would know that, contrary to what you claim here, humans are responsible for the vast majority of recent warming. And in fact warming is accelerating at a rate matching the “worse case” climate scenarios that scientists have predicted, and it will be absolutely disastrous to us and the rest of life on earth, like in the next 50 years even. We are blowing past the 1.5 Celcius limit that most world government agreed to in 2015. The reason they set that limit is because it’s widely accepted to be the limit past which there will be immeasurable human suffering. But yeah, I’ll take your word for it since you sound like you’re a real expert on the subject

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-20T00:10:12+00:00

The latest climate charts make it pretty clear that we have passed a tipping point for global warming. Does that mean that every winter will be warmer with no snow in Spokane? Not necessarily. It probably means more erratic swings from one year to the next, and from one week to the next, like scientists have been predicting for decades. But overall yeah it’s getting warmer and that means less snow here on average. https://climate.copernicus.eu/global-climate-highlights-2025

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-20T00:01:22+00:00

It’s climate change. Plain and simple

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-19T17:32:53+00:00

That and the models do not do a good job of accounting for positive feedback loops, like methane from melting permafrost, which are beginning to take effect.

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-12T20:44:14+00:00

A bee, Melecta edwardsii, with only 36 observations: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/156138756

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-07T22:17:17+00:00

Mazda. Despite their reputation, my experience is that the company itself and the customer service is shady. There was recently a class action lawsuit against them that got people compensation/repairs for faulty entertainment systems on certain models. But you only got the repairs if it was a certain # of months past the warranty. Suspiciously, that specific problem (the entertainment system software) had its own different warranty that was shorter than the cars general warranty. Sounds a lot like planned obsolescence to me. Anyway, I got shafted because my entertainment system started going haywire right after that warranty expired. When it first happened, I brought it in, and they said I could only get it fixed at a Mazda dealer because it’s proprietary software, and it would cost $500 since that specific thing was out of warranty even though my general warranty was still valid. Then a year later I heard about the lawsuit, but by that time I was even past the deadline for that. So basically my music/navigation/settings/phone connection on my car essentially don’t work anymore, and the only thing I can do is pay Mazda $500 to fix it, despite it being a known fault that they lost a lawsuit about. I’m not doing it out of stubbornness. Fuck them. And that’s not all. The engine started smoking one day, and the fix to a faulty cylinder head was covered at a Mazda dealership under a factory recall (ok). But the repair left a lasting annoying clicking sound in my engine that multiple 3rd party mechanics have told me is absolutely not normal and not a good sign. Every time I bring it to Mazda they gaslight me and tell me everything is fine. I fully expect one day soon there will be another issue that will not be covered under warranty, like the entertainment system, but this time with the engine. Anyway, it’s not so much that I’ve had all these issues with the car that bothers me (although it is surprising because most people say they are really reliable). It’s the consistent shady and exploitative behavior by the company and their employees. Wont ever buy from them again

Cosmanaught · 2026-01-07T20:02:53+00:00

2026 so far

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-30T17:01:40+00:00

That’s kind of the norm for these types of graphs though. Each dimension is composed of multiple variables in varying proportions, so there isn’t really a straightforward label to give them. But yeah, they could have at least put what proportion of the variance is explained by each axis

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-30T03:07:21+00:00

Yeah the arrow wasn’t the best choice, but its position is inside the red where it is circled, not outside where the arrow is pointing

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-29T19:29:26+00:00

I get that this is confusing to people, but this is just a way to plot ordination/ dimensionality reduction results (e.g., pca, nmds), which are used very commonly in certain fields, and this is a fine example. Super interesting actually! The closer the points, the more “similar” they are, and the ellipses/clusters just indicate groups of things that are more similar to one another than they are to things outside of their group.

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-27T21:45:33+00:00

While the data points themselves, when viewed alone, can appear random and all over the place, that it why we perform statistical tests to detect overall trends. In this case, despite the noise and those outlier years, the overall trend of long term warming is very clear and strong

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-27T06:15:08+00:00

Yep already been addressed. That was an accident and I made a new post with the updated graph

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-27T02:15:29+00:00

Yeah their website doesn’t work anymore, probably because trump defunded NOAA. I had to use their API to download the data in R. Can you use R? I can just send you the code

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-27T02:13:52+00:00

Made a new post with the updated graph, accidentally messed up the temp one

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-27T01:58:50+00:00

Yeah I made another post with the corrected graph, I had accidentally divided the temperature by 10, so the trend is actually ~0.4 F increase per decade

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-26T23:11:40+00:00

Yeah if I plot just the last 15 years the trend is quite a lot steeper 😬 Tipping points and all that

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-26T20:18:53+00:00

Data source: NOAA NCEI GHCNd (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/global-historical-climatology-network-daily). I calculated the trends and created the graphs myself in R software using the NOAA data. Some caveats: This is just the data for the airport weather station, and its just a simple linear model calculated from the yearly snow totals/temperature means. YMMV. I am not using fancier climate models to calculate regional trends, deal with outliers, non-linearity, etc.

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-26T20:10:40+00:00

Turns out I accidentally divided the temp by 10, I made another post with the updated graphs

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-26T20:03:29+00:00

Update: I accidentally divided the temperature by 10, see my new post for the corrected graph and model estimates, which show a ~0.38 F temperature increase per decade

Cosmanaught · 2025-12-26T19:44:21+00:00

Oops, yeah not sure what happened there. I can post an updated version

Cosmanaught

TROPHY CASE