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What thrifting taught me, and why I hope it catches on

As I begin writing this, the latest CO 2 reading stands at 429.49 ppm and about 50 wars are ongoing in the world. It feels easier today to sympathize with someone who is not "interested" in tackling climate change. So I write today, not as a climate scientist looking to clarify any technical aspects of the climate crisis, but as a climate-conscious citizen looking to share something that brings her hope. I started thrifting about 7 years ago, when I moved to Montreal. A close friend introduced me to the practice and I cannot be thankful enough. Thrifting is essentially the practice of frequenting "thrift stores" or "used goods stores", knowing that you can find many useful things over time even though you can never be sure of what you would find on a particular day. The practice seems to be quite common and widely accepted in many cities in North America and Europe. This is heartening because these are also the regions with high per capita emissions. I h...
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The El Nino is not THE problem

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What is ENSO? Page 2 - SSTs and trade winds

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  This is Page 2 of the sub-series "What is ENSO?". If you haven't already, please read Page 1 first. For convenience, keep that page open in a different tab. = = = What is ENSO? In the previous post , we learnt to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperature anomalies . In this post, I'm going to answer a question that no one really asked ―  What if I wanted to identify ENSO phases from the perspective of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) instead? What if, for no good reason but because I felt like it, I wanted to do away with the "anomalies" bit? Looking at SSTs instead of SST anomalies makes matters unnecessarily complicated, but we're going to do it anyway because it also teaches us a lot. In the image below, I've plotted SSTs from the HadISST dataset. These are mean SSTs for the months of December, January and February (DJF) over all years from 1872-2009. Why did we select the months of DJF? Because ENSO events can be seen...
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