I am totally immersed in departmental bureaucracy (curriculum etc) and a piece on metaverse and journalism. In the meantime, I missed some significant events in Turkey. I am getting lazy for the blog Here is something to be anxious about:
People look at a site damaged by Turkish airstrikes in Hasakah province, Syria. Photograph: Baderkhan Ahmad/AP
Journalists martyred in defence of the truth in Rojava..Our comrades were martyred in attacks of Turkish occupation and its mercenaries. these comrades wanted conveying the truth about the Rojava revolution to the whole world, those left a great legacy on the path of the sacrifice.
After Turkey’s intense air strikes on North and East Syria and Northern Iraq launched in the early hours of Sunday, protests against Turkey’s attacks took place in several different European cities.
10:01 am 21/11/ After Turkey’s intense air strikes on North and East Syria and Northern Iraq launched in the early hours of Sunday 20 November, Kurds living in Europe took to the streets to protest.
On Sunday night and Monday the bombimgs, spread and worsened, and were joined by state massacres of Kurds in Irani Kurdistan and attacks by both Iran and Turkey on Kurds in Iraq in Sulaymaniya… see updating reports..
Upon the call of the European Kurdish Democratic Societies Congress (KCDK-E), demonstrations were held on Sunday in several European cities, and continued throughout the day.
Grîgny Mayor Philippe Rio and Deputy Mayor Evelyne Lebriand attended a march in the Evry district of Paris.
Digital technology is enabling scientists to detect and interpret the sounds of species as diverse as honey bees, peacocks, and elephants. In an e360 interview, geographer Karen Bakker discusses the surprising and complex ways that animals and plants use sound to communicate.
Researchers are decoding the language of elephants.
Karen Bakker is a geographer who studies digital innovation and environmental governance. Her latest book, The Sounds of Life, trawls through more than a thousand scientific papers and Indigenous knowledge to explore our emerging understanding of the planet’s soundscape.
Microphones are now so cheap, tiny, portable, and wirelessly connected that they can be installed on animals as small as bees, and in areas as remote as underneath Arctic ice. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence software can now help decode the patterns and meaning of the recorded sounds. These technologies have opened the door to decoding non-human communication — in both animals and plants — and understanding the damage that humanity’s noise pollution can wreak.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Bakker, a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of British Columbia, describes how researchers are constructing dictionaries of animal communication, focusing on elephants, honey bees, whales, and bats. “I think it’s quite likely,” she says, “that within 10 years, we will have the ability to do interactive conversations with these four species.”
Karen Bakker. University of British Columbia
Yale Environment 360: What inspired you to write this book?
Karen Bakker: I’ve taught a course on environment and sustainability for the past two decades, and every year the picture is grimmer. My students are dealing with a lot of ecological grief and climate anxiety. I wanted to write a book for them. They are digital natives. Digital technology is so often associated with our alienation from nature, but I wanted to explore how digital technology could potentially reconnect us, instead, and offer measured hope in a time of environmental crisis.
The Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog, with its bark-like mating call, went extinct in 2016. Brian Gratwicke via Wikipedia
In part, the idea about sound came from the work that I was doing with Indigenous communities. I was really struck by Indigenous teachings about being in dialogue with the nonhuman world. Such dialogues are not merely allegorical or metaphorical, but real exchanges between beings with different languages. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass that in Potawatomi teachings, at one time all beings spoke the same language, and that has fractured.
As I started to delve into these topics, the world of digital bioacoustics was just opening up — there’s been a literal explosion in research in the last 10 years, and I caught that wave. I was fascinated by scientists rediscovering some things that Indigenous communities have long known, with very interesting digital experimental methods.
e360: You looked at more than 100 species, including some obvious noise makers and sound detectors like whales and bats. Can you give an example that surprised you?
Bakker: Peacocks make infrasound with their tails in the mating dance. We used to think the big tail was a visual display, and it is. But they’re also making infrasound with their tails at a specific frequency that vibrates the comb on top of the peahen’s head. We’ve known about that mating dance for probably thousands of years, but we only just figured out that it’s got a sonic component.
“Octopi hear in their arms with little organelles. There’s a myriad of ways nature has invented to hear that don’t involve ears.”
A young humpback whale with its mother near the island of Rurutu in French Polynesia. Alexis Rosenfeld / Getty Images
e360: You also cover species we traditionally think of as silent, such as coral larvae and plants. How do creatures that don’t even have ears hear?
Bakker: They are hearing: they are sensing sound, and they are deriving ecologically meaningful and relevant information from that sound.
Coral larvae, which are microscopic organisms, are able to distinguish not only the sounds of healthy versus unhealthy reefs, but to discern the sound of their own reef and swim towards it, even from miles away across the open ocean. That puts them in the same category as great bird migrations, given their size. We don’t really fully understand how this is happening; we’ve only just learned that they’re capable of doing it.
Heidi Appel at the University of Toledo did this great experiment with plants: plants are played the sound of insects chomping on plant leaves, and they react with the release of defensive chemicals.
To access superhot rock geothermal energy requires drilling down to rock that is 400 degrees Celsius, or 752 degrees Fahrenheit.Graphic courtesy of nonprofit Clean Air Task Force
Deep Geothermal — One Renewable Energy Source To Rule Them All?
Imagine, if you will, a decommissioned coal generating station sitting cold and dark. It has a direct connection to the grid, but no electrons flow because burning coal destroys the environment.
But wait! What if, by some alchemy, some magic, a supply of superheated steam that is the correct temperature and pressure to make those old turbines spin again were available?
And what if that steam was heated without any carbon emissions at all by the Earth’s own geothermal energy 12 miles below the surface?
Science fiction? Not according to Paul Woskov, a research engineer at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. For the past 14 years, he has been experimenting with a device known as a gyrotron in his research into fusion power. Woskov’s ideas have been adopted by a new MIT spinoff known as Quaise Energy.
CEO Carlos Araque tells Bloomberg, a gyrotron is “a big cousin of the microwave in your kitchen.” It operates using different frequencies than a microwave and is 1,000 times more powerful, but “It’s a fairly mature technology. We just use it for this purpose,” Araque says. What does it do? Well, I am not a physicist nor have I ever played one on TV. But the short answer is, it blasts a hole thorough just about any material you can think of, including the rock in the Earth’s crust that surrounds the mantle.
The crust is from 9 to 12 miles thick — far thicker than any conventional equipment can drill through. Below it is the Earth’s mantle, which varies from 1000º C to 3700º C. Blast a passageway to the mantle, shoot some water down the hole and bazanga! Instant, high pressure steam from a virtually inexhaustible source that could power all of humanity’s energy needs for millions of years. Are you excited yet?
Deep Geothermal Is Closer Than You Think
This new technology isn’t here yet, but it’s not as far away as you might think. “This will happen quickly once we solve the immediate engineering problems of transmitting a clean beam and having it operate at a high energy density without breakdown,” Woskov says. “It’ll go fast because the underlying technology, gyrotrons, are commercially available.”
“Loss and damage is a way of both recognizing past harm and compensating for that past harm,” said Dartmouth climate scientist Justin Mankin.
Activists encourage world leaders to maintain policies that limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and provide reparations for loss and damage at the COP27 UN Climate Summit, Nov. 19, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Seth Borenstein, Samy Magdy and Frank Jordans | SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) 19 Nov. 2022
Negotiators early Sunday approved a historic deal that would create a fund for compensating poor nations that are victims of extreme weather worsened by rich countries’ carbon pollution, but an overall larger agreement still was up in the air because of a fight over emission reduction efforts.
After the decision on the fund was approved, talks were put on hold for 30 minutes so delegates could read texts of other measures they were to vote on.
Turkey is conducting intense air strikes on Kobani, Shehba, Shengal (Sinjar), Derik regions in Northeast Syria. Qandil and Asos regions in Northern Iraq are targets of the bombings as well.
The flag of Rojava (Autonomous NE Syria, AANES) raised in the Syrian town of Kobane. Photograph: Kemal Aslan/Reuters
Last night & this morning, Turkey conducted a series of aerial attacks across NES. So far, 11 civilians have reportedly been killed (1 journalist) and 6 injured (2 journalists). The attacks occurred across US- and Russian-controlled airspace; both likely gave the green light.
Turkish army warplanes launched airstrikes on many settlements in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI).
The head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) media centre Farhad Shami announced Turkey’s air strikes on Twitter, saying “Kobane, the city that defeated ISIS, is subjected to bombardment by the aircraft of the Turkish occupation.”
Comment: Turkey needed Russian and US permission to illegally bomb NE Syrian airspace. Yet there is no report of the attacks on Russian RT English News. As for the US they merely warned their citizens 48 hrs before. Turkish’s jets fly from the nearby NATO Incirlik base…. Big fear is if a new ground invasion will begin… go figure!
In Qamishlo this morning, residents organized a march, taking to the streets to protest Turkey's attacks. pic.twitter.com/9p2vqJUSXQ
The Democratic Kurdistan Community Congress in Europe (KCDK-E) Co-Chairs called on people in Europe to come out to the streets to protest Turkey’s attacks on North East Syria.
updated#Kobane, the city that defeated ISIS, is subjected to bombardment by the aircraft of the Turkish occupation.
The airstrikes targeted Kobani, Shehba, Gire Spi, Derik, Shengal (Sinjar), and Karaçox. Qandil and Asos regions in Northern Iraq are targets of the bombings as well.
“…Oh, a little reminder to those who still believe Russia is fighting the good fight against the globalist baddies in Ukraine – Russia is a member of the G20 and signed the pledge. As did China, along with every other member of BRICS. There are no heroes here, they are all in it together…but their war sure made for a good distraction, didn’t it? Basically, it’s all just confirmation – if confirmation were needed – that the Great Reset is still coming. Even if Covid goes away, the new normal is here to stay. But, of course, that was always the plan”
Yes, while everyone was so nicely distracted by the “fall of Kherson” and that missile that allegedly hit Poland, leaders from around the world were gathering in matching shirts and publishing their plans for world government in glossy little ring binders.
We’ve already seen the COP27 focus on “alternative farming” (ie. lab-grown meat and eating insects), but the G20 leader’s declaration is much more ambitious. And we still have the UN Biodiversity Summit to look forward to.
Here is something to be anxious about:
The Free 
