HWFO

Turning atmospheric CO2 into plastic probably isn't as feasible as turning CO2 into some other stable form directly. Diverting petroleum production into plastic and them making sure it ends up in landfills rather than the sea[1] does seem like a good thing to the extent that plastic production funges against fuel production, I'm not sure to what extent these rely on separating different parts of the oil that comes out of the ground in the refinery for different uses rather than having one common pool that could be used for either. But plastic buried in landfills does seem to remain out of the biosphere for long enough to be a useful repository of carbon.

[1] Remember, throw plastic away don't try to recycle it or it'll mostly end up in the middle of the Pacific https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-straws

"Talkin About Hunga Tonga":

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/talkin-about-hunga-tonga

FTFA:

"The authors project this one volcano produced a warming effect on the planet equal to about 5.2 years worth of total global carbon emissions in one go, and it’s going to be stuck up there for over half a decade.

Let’s restate that to be perfectly clear.

If you believe that CO2 is slowly warming the planet, then the net result of this one very unusual volcano will be to fast forward global warming five years, and keep us at that fast-forward location for between five and ten years, and then will slowly abate. But because 2023 internet life is a sea of culture war, that straightforward scientific conclusion has gotten churned into the modern media culture war engine, dragging the study’s authors into the milieu.

This post basically explains the bait-and-switch being used.

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between?s=r

The post also questions how studies like the one you linked are measuring gun ownership rate. Every reliable study uses % of suicides with guns as a proxy for gun ownership rates. RAND notes the same thing: "A fundamental limitation for all of the studies is the lack of direct measures of gun prevalence. All of the authors use FS/S as a proxy for gun prevalence" https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/firearm-prevalence-violent-crime.html

https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/firearm-prevalence-violent-crime.html

Even before clicking on the story, I knew there would be a "gun-related homicide" vs. "gun ownership" graph, and not an "all homicide" vs. "gun ownership" graph. Do we want to minimize all homicide, or only gun homicide, and don't care about people killed by other means? (It goes without saying that any human right that increases homicide rate should be abolished /s)

The missing data: https://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership

And more on typical data manipulation in gun debates: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between

https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between

> There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.

> There was a reasonably strong correlation between the rate of guns recovered and traced in a state in 2019 and that state’s murder rate

How strange they would use the "rate of guns recovered and traced", and not simply gun ownership. Presumably those guns aren't traced for the fun of it, but largely to assist in crime investigations?

Perhaps the reason is that, if you use plain gun ownership data, the trends are far less clear: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between