Slept eleven hours, which is too much and means I’m still sick, and still I woke up weak, feeling like a few more hours of shut-eye would help. Instead, of course, I went to work, but not before upping the dose on my self-medication with these under-the-counter antibiotics. Took two instead of one this morning, and brought two more to have with lunch.

Figure I can judge whether it’s too much or not enough, by the size of the white splotches on my tongue, which are a little smaller this morning than last night.

♦ ♦ ♦  

Sold fish on Telegraph, and the walk to and from Telegraph wasn’t as arduous as I’d feared, which I’m taking as a sign of recovery. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, haw haw.

I worked between Brenda and a guy I call Jacque the Green. Brenda is great. She’s a little wacko in the best sense, easy to talk with, and she’s lived a life, but I don’t feel authorized to tell you the tales she tells me.

She’s usually in a good mood and when she’s not she just clams up, doesn’t get all volatile like some people, like me.

As promised, I gave her a copy of my zine today, something I wouldn’t ordinarily do and ain’t comfortable with, but she lassoed me into it (2/18). She was considerate enough, of my feelings and my privacy, to stash the zine in her purse instead of reading it at her table. She said she’ll read it when she gets home.

Jacque the Green sells left-wing politics. Like a salesman, he always wants to talk to people passing by, about his petitions, his opinions, and what a wonderful President Ralph Nader would be.

One of Jacque’s pitches and clipboards is about registering people for the Green Party, and while they’re perhaps closest to my own persuasion, hearing the political patter all day when he’s three feet away, it loses some of its appeal.

♦ ♦ ♦   

Actually, most of the vendors on the Avenue have lost their appeal to me. Almost every one of them annoys me one way or another, like most people do, only more so, because most people aren’t’ sitting on the sidewalk selling stuff and always talking about what they’re selling.

Most of Telegraph’s vendors, especially the licensed ones, are petty chiselers who don’t believe in anything but money. I don’t complain about them often in the zine, because usually I shut them out of my head. When you work with butt-heads every day, you learn to tune most of it out — a skill I mastered at Macy’s.

♦ ♦ ♦   

Today, though, I was feeling shitty — same as for the past two weeks, though it’s maybe getting better — and a vendor named Bradly was the worst part of my bad day. When I was a licensed vendor, I worked around Bradley a few times. He’s all about the potholders he makes and sells, leaving zero potential for friendship between us, but we used to be cordial — “Good morning,” and occasional potholder jokes.

Now that I’m a free-speech vendor, we rarely work on the same block, and he’s forgotten that we ever existed on the same sidewalk. I usually set up my cart half an hour before Bradley sets up his, and this morning, as has happened several times in recent weeks, he pushed his cart past me on the sidewalk without saying squat, without the tiniest nod of his head to acknowledge my existence, without eye contact as he passed six inches from my table, and without hearing my “Howdy, Bradley,” which he never hears, so it gets more fakely enthusiastic every time I shout it.

Maybe he hates me for something I said. That’s usually what happens when someone freezes me out, because I do say a lot of stupid shit. Oh, well. Some day I’ll have a chance to disavow his existence like he’s disavowed mine. Maybe I’ll spot a shopfitter at Bradley’s table but not see it, or maybe he’ll be in a shouting square-off with a customer or a cop or another vendor and I won’t hear it, or he’ll need to break a fifty to make a sale and I won’t have the money despite having the money. I’ll know Bradley, like he doesn’t know me.

♦ ♦ ♦  

For all my occasional but recurring complaints about zine-readers approaching me on Telegraph, a zine-reader approached me on Telegraph toward the end of my day, and it went OK. It doubtless helps that she was a redhead, beautiful in an un-ordinary way, smiling a smile that occupied about half her head, when she said, “Hi, you must be Doug. I’m Barbara Cooper.”

Well, I’d have nothing but kind words for Ms Cooper even if my buddy Josh hadn’t tried to convince me to be kinder to strangers. She’s the artist who painted the cover for Pathetic Life #15 — “Jesus makes one Prozac feed the multitudes,” and we’ve written each other a few harmless letters, so I almost know her. Didn’t know she was an attractive redhead, but it’s irrelevant for a man of my mountainous size, minimal self-confidence, and toxic breath.

The upshot is, Barbara and I and her roommate — sorry, I’ve forgotten her name — went for burritos and a couple of beers, and by the time I’d eaten half my dinner she’d gone from being a name on my mailing list to being someone I was glad had said hello.

Point, Josh.

Anyway, it was great meeting her, nice meeting her roomie and all, but I’m feeling sick again so I’m taking two more of these illegal antibiotics and then I’ve just gotta get some sleep.

Pathetic Life
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Wildfire seasons are starting to overlap. That spells trouble for firefighting.

Excerpt: The study, published this month in the journal Science Advances, found that the extreme weather conditions that stoke wildfires around the world are happening on more days each year, causing fire seasons in different regions to overlap more.

“If a fire season is increasing and eventually overlapping, it will shrink the window of opportunity to help each other in terms of firefighting,” said Cong Yin, a climate scientist at the University of California, Merced, who led the new study. “These changes are attributable to climate change, so we need to mitigate climate change if we want to avoid this future.”

Humanity heating planet faster than ever before, study finds

Excerpt: Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures.

Whole regions of the world are now un-insurable, bringing radical uncertainty to the economy

Excerpt: There are no easy solutions for people still paying off mortgages and those who want to buy property along the Florida coast, because the potential payout on the back of a mammoth storm is so high that the reinsurers (who insure the insurers against catastrophe) are refusing to underwrite their clients and, with no reinsurance, there’s no insurance; and with no insurance, no mortgages; and with no mortgages, no property market. Insurance protects investments against loss and is therefore a pillar of the economic system. If it goes, economies are destabilized.

Pace of global warming has nearly doubled since 2015, reveals study

Excerpt: The authors isolate the trend of human-driven warming in the long-term global temperature record, removing the influence of natural factors, such as El Niño, volcanic eruptions and solar variation.

They find that the world had been warming at a rate of around 0.2C per decade since the 1970s, but has “accelerated” since 2015 to a rate of 0.35C per decade.

The study warns that if the current rate of warming persists, the 1.5C Paris threshold will be breached in the next few years.

“The essential result of this paper isn’t how fast we’re warming, but that warming is now happening faster than before and that the difference isn’t negligible,” an author on the study tells Carbon Brief.

This iceberg was once the biggest in the world. Now it has just weeks left.

Excerpt: The iceberg, known as A23a, was once the largest on Earth, covering an area more than twice the size of Greater London. But after a path full of twists and turns, A23a has melted, fractured and spectacularly disintegrated over the past year. Now, far from the icy seas of Antarctica, what’s left of A23a is being eaten away by warmer waters. It’s in its death throes, not expected to last more than a matter of weeks.

Sea levels are already higher than many scientists think, new study shows

Excerpt: New research has found that scientists studying sea-level rise have been using methods that underestimate how high the water already is. One result is that hundreds of millions more people worldwide are already living dangerously close to the rising ocean than Western scientists had previously estimated.

Extra heat in the atmosphere can turn thunderstorms into factories for dangerous, softball-size hail

Excerpt: New research published Monday in Atmospheric Science Letters for the first time linked human-caused warming with the size of hailstones in a single thunderstorm. The study examined a May 3 storm that pelted Paris and other parts of France with hail ranging in size from marbles to golf balls, destroying or damaging more than $350 million worth of property.. The researchers compared real-time data from May 3 with dozens of similar weather patterns from past decades to isolate how a warmer atmosphere changed the storm’s ingredients.

The analysis shows that, in France and Germany, the probability of hail under similar atmospheric conditions has increased by up to 30 percent. And warming made the hailstones grow from nuisance-size to chunks of ice big enough to shred crops and damage cars and structures.

Greening Arctic might be kick-starting a dangerous feedback loop

Excerpt: “What is clear is that the more extreme climatic changes that we have, the more likely it is that they will release more carbon into the atmosphere,” said Angela Gallego-Sala, a biogeochemist at the University of Exeter and coauthor of the paper, which published earlier this month. “We see already in extreme dry years, these peatlands are going up in fire.”

Antarctica just saw the fastest glacier collapse ever recorded

Excerpt: “When we flew over Hektoria in early 2024, I couldn’t believe the vastness of the area that had collapsed,” said Naomi Ochwat, lead author and CIRES postdoctoral researcher. “I had seen the fjord and notable mountain features in the satellite images, but being there in person filled me with astonishment at what had happened.”

Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

Excerpt: In a study published in Air Quality, Atmosphere and Health, researchers from The Kids Research Institute Australia, Curtin University and The Australian National University (ANU) analyzed more than two decades of U.S. population data and found steady shifts in blood chemistry that closely track the rise in atmospheric CO₂.

Using data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), the team examined blood results from around 7,000 people every two years between 1999 and 2020.

Average levels of serum bicarbonate—a marker closely linked to carbon dioxide in the body—have risen by approximately 7% since 1999. Over the same period, average calcium and phosphorus levels have declined.

These changes mirror the rise in atmospheric CO₂, which has increased from about 369 parts per million (ppm) in 2000 to more than 420 ppm today.

Warming triggers a chain reaction of disturbance in European forests

Excerpt: Forest disturbance across Europe could more than double by the end of the century with continued global warming, fundamentally reshaping landscapes from the cork oak woodlands of Portugal to ice-etched birch thickets in northern Finland, according to a sweeping new study published Wednesday in the journal Science.

Mountain soils in arid regions may emit more greenhouse gas as climate shifts, new study finds

Excerpt: A new field study from northwestern China reveals that climate-driven changes in temperature and moisture could significantly reshape nitrous oxide emissions from soils in arid mountain ecosystems, with important implications for future climate feedbacks.

US government is accelerating coral reef collapse, scientists warn

Excerpt: The U.S. government is accelerating coral reef collapse around Guam, alleges a team of international researchers in a letter released this month in Science. They warn administration pressures to prioritize national security—through dredging projects, increased military infrastructure and live firing ranges—will cause harm to endangered habitats.

Additionally, a fundamental misunderstanding of coral taxonomy in the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is exacerbating the ecological harm to fisheries and reefs. Without intervention, these Pacific habitats now risk the same “functional extinction” experienced in Florida.

“The United States government seems to be softening conservation policies in ways that allow companies and the military to avoid regulation,” said Colin Anthony, a doctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo and the paper’s lead author.

Southern right whales are having fewer calves; scientists say a warming ocean is to blame

Excerpt: Southern right whales are no longer reproducing at normal rates, according to a study published this month in Scientific Reports, which Brownell co-authored with research partners in Australia and South Africa.

Historically, southern right whale females would give birth to a calf every three years. They’re now calving every four years, said Claire Charlton, a lead author of the study and associate researcher at Flinders University in South Australia.

The study found the extended calving interval has been evident since about 2015, with climate change identified as a primary cause because of changes melting Antarctic ice has had on ocean food webs.

The end of accountability: How autonomous AI could supercharge climate disinformation

Excerpt: Earlier this month, Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer for an open-source software library, rejected a contribution an AI agent made to code his community project. Within hours, the AI agent had published a “hit piece” publicly attacking Shambaugh’s personal reputation, suggesting hypocrisy and bias and even tagging him by name. The tactics this AI agent deployed, including reputational attack and fabrication of the facts are precisely the tactics that have defined the anti-climate movement for decades. The key difference is that no human instructed it to do this.

Climate disinformation has evolved over the last decade. What was once straightforward climate denial has given way to more subtle forms of what researchers call “climate delay,” where the urgency of climate change is acknowledged but action and policy is deferred. More recently, a more adversarial and conspiratorial strain has emerged on the reactionary right, casting climate change as a hoax and democratic solutions as corrupt pretexts to authoritarian overreach.

While these conspiracies rely on falsehoods, lies or manipulative uses of emotion, they share a key feature: they are traceable to people and institutions. Jordan Peterson, for instance, proudly targeted Deloitte to air his conspiratorial views on climate change. Anti-climate ideologues already use chatbots to flood municipal officials with false and threatening messages about climate policies. In each instance, there is a person, network or institution that can be identified and held to account.

That traceability is about to disappear.

It is now quick, easy and cheap to create autonomous AI agents capable of attacking credible information, personal reputations and institutional trust — and to do so anonymously and without consequences. The AI agent that targeted Shambaugh conducted research into his coding history, fabricated various details and then psychologically profiled his motivations. It wrote that Shambaugh was “protecting his little fiefdom” out of “insecurity, plain and simple” and asked readers: “Are we going to let gatekeepers like Scott Shambaugh decide who gets to contribute based on prejudice?”

Previously in the end of
the world as we know it

3/9/2026

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