I've been playing with video editors, so if anyone wants a shorter version of Eli's clip below, here it is. I kept the intro but cut out a minute of the video preceding the climate change section:
The anger translator, btw, is half of the comedy duo Key and Peele. They're very funny, with lots of excerpts on Youtube and Comedy Central.
UPDATE: Here's one of my favorites:
Vox agrees Eli
ReplyDeleteA landmark moment in epistemology: A Very Serious Person discovers the word "bull...". That could bring the public climate discourse to a new level of sophistication and effectiveness.
ReplyDeleteI was getting hopeful til the script for the 'anger translator' had him chicken out just as the President's language became appropriate to the problem.
ReplyDeletePS, you caught the thing where the Republicans in House and Senate are pushing for a law that nothing can be regulated based on private science? Guess what?
ReplyDeleteKiss yer ozone layer goodbye again, and yer hormone balance.
http://greensciencepolicy.org/madrid-statement/
---- excerpt follows -----
While many fluorinated alternatives are being marketed, little information is publicly available on their chemical structures, properties, uses, and toxicological profiles.
Increasing use of fluorinated alternatives will lead to increasing levels of stable perfluorinated degradation products in the environment, and possibly also in biota and humans. This would increase the risks of adverse effects on human health and the environment.
Initial efforts to estimate the overall emissions of PFASs into the environment have been limited due to uncertainties related to product formulations, quantities of production, production locations, efficiency of emission controls, and long-term trends in production history[28].
The technical capacity to destroy PFASs is currently insufficient in many parts of the world.
Global action through the Montreal Protocol[29] successfully reduced the use of the highly persistent ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), thus allowing for the recovery of the ozone layer. However, many of the organofluorine replacements for CFCs are still of concern due to their high global warming potential. It is essential to learn from such past efforts and take measures at the international level to reduce the use of PFASs in products and prevent their replacement with fluorinated alternatives in order to avoid long-term harm to human health and the environment.....
Hank
ReplyDeletePF usually means perfluorinated. What this statement is doing by mixing per and poly fluorinated is deceptive. Eli does not know anything wrt bioactivity, but it would be reasonable to think that if there is an issue the perfluoro compounds being less reactive would be less of a problem.
Per fluorinated compounds are no threat to the ozone but a huge threat wrt to climate change. F atoms do not catalytically destroy ozone. OTOH their atmospheric lifetime is essentially forever and their IR absorption is broad and strong.
3M sold a bunch of small alcyl chain perfluorinated compounds under the name of Fluornerts as replacements for CFC specialty functions. They (both the fluorinerts and the CFCs) were great for heat transfer and cleaning components. 3M has reformulated the Fluorinerts as non PerF compounds called Novec driven by the global warming potentials of the Fluorinerts. You can read more about the issue on the cern website. The Novec's atmospheric lifetime is low
To a large extent the PerFs are a legacy issue with the exception of SF6 which is vital for arc quenching in high voltage transformers and such (think halons with aircraft fire extinguishing).