It’s worth trying, the principle works.
Indeed I even felt it from paragliding, how large dark patches form rising convection cells, later fluffy clouds.
Unstable air is also needed, which is rare within the descending side of big Hadley cells - why these areas are deserts. Otoh the big deserts were greener in the past, so it might be possible again.
Yes they invested enormously in high-speed train lines. But look on satellite image around those train stations, new city blocks have massive roads everywhere, 5 lanes in each direction, plus in parallel another set of toll roads. Even if those roads were empty , the cement and steel for all that has contributed enormous quantity of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Chinese emissions per capita are higher than european average for many years now, however they always pick the worst country in the world for comparison statistics.
You are right, it’s simple numbers, scientific fact, pity so much downvotes, people should check recent data rather than get stuck with old concepts from 1990s (when climate politics began).
lopq’s original comment is correct for ‘whole west’ too. the second part is also true per capita. By the way europe also has a lot more people than united states, it’s not irrelevant.
As it happens I’ve been calculating per capita emissions for 28 years, since COP2. You can see my model here.
No I certainly don’t include Russia nor Turkey, although europe is more than EU. Korea is indeed notable. Regarding what they call ‘consumption emissions’, you can get such data from Global Carbon Project, on that I’m less an expert but my hunch is that industry emissions are dominated by heavy products like steel and cement for construction (made with help of gigatons of coal), rather than light consumer goods for export. Over-construction is the root of the problem, global emissions will peak (maybe now) as that bubble bursts.
Tragic, but change now seems inevitable, although they didn’t cause it ( should be compensated by the big soybean/cattle-ranchers who driver deforestation, inter alia ). Maybe similar situation to Sundarbans in Bengal ( although they don’t have açaí ) .
While preserving the world’s forests is widely considered essential to combating climate change, scientists in South Africa have determined that invasive tree species are sucking up so much groundwater that the area is better off eliminating the trees.
Hope they thought through the whole story. Cape town has a micorclimate squeezed between sea and desert, so it may be a special case, but in general as climate changes, plants should be able to migrate too. Trees evapo-transpire, large areas of trees help to create clouds, and convection cells, and maybe rain. So such policy might help increase groundwater in the short term, but not in the longer term.
Good idea, hope it catches on, When I began coding, we had to design efficient loops and be careful with memory, but recently brute force applied “in the cloud” seems to dominate, especially with AI. Perhaps this approach can help give a little credit to those who still try to develop efficient software.
[ p.s. you might get more comments if cross-post to a programming / software community ? ]
At 1000 km/hr, it’d run out of track in less than four minutes, hope it can stop in time … Anyway not convinced there’s much point in this. China should be building more suburban rail networks to fill the gaps, instead of pouring so much concrete into crazy-wide highways and toll-roads (look on satellite image, you’ll see).
“Climate warming and drying is leading to these very large fire years, which then facilitate this overwintering fire activity,” Jennifer Baltzer, a biology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, told the Toronto Star.
I’ve seen similar underground winter fires in Siberia, smoke from peat emerging through snowy forests - and that was 1997-98 (also an El Niño winter). Adding a lot of extra carbon, bad positive feedback …
We have ducks in the garden, neighbours have chickens, glad of our choice - ducks seem more fun.
Ducks help mow grass, eat slugs and bugs, don’t seem to damage vegetables. At any sound of digging they gather around - in the way - waiting for worms. Make mud near water, otherwise tidy. They are managing ok with buckets awaiting repair of pond. Our dog loves watching the ducks, stalks but doesn’t touch them, useless at herding them home. Searching for eggs is a family game, but mostly just during the first half of the year.
p.s. fwiw, here’s a lemmy community on ducks
Of all the placard photos to choose to highlight, Nature could have found better than “science = fact” which seems to me more a proclamation of faith than encouragement of experiment.
Regarding the somewhat strange differences between countries, I suspect there may be a linguistic issue - words like “science” and “trust” have different scope in different cultures and systems - hard to ask the same questions everywhere.
Jon is quite right, in many places they are not trying to significantly increase modal share, the problem is lack of trains to use the capacity of the network, plus some gaps/bottlenecks in that network.
Also the business model of SNCF is particularly bad (should be called SNCP - just designed for small elite living in Paris), while DB suffers from years of underfunding infrastructure. Situation is improving in some other corners of europe, but too slowly to pull enough traffic from air and road.
Compare with the expansion of chinese railways over the last decade.
[ By the way, is that photo the Meuse (Dinant-Givet) ? I’d like to use that line if it would reopen ]
I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that “coupling” in such models of complex systems is a ‘good’ thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc… (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
If restarting in scala3 I’d structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I’d known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn’t anticipate such complexity.
District heating makes sense from a purely technical point of view, however it’s important to consider social incentives too. Such systems were everywhere in former Soviet union, also in China. They can work great when they are new, but underground pipes eventually develop leaks, need digging up and fixing, and this got neglected during the soviet stagnation era (from Brezhnev onwards). Consequently, most of the hot water disappeared underground (I heard this from Ukrainian engineering students), steam rose from the ground in city streets (I saw this) - often damaging nearby structures, and even in mid Siberia there were lines without snow, above the pipes (also saw this). The subsequent inefficiency was a major factor behind the flop of the post-soviet economies in the 1990s (Ukraine had highest emissions / GDP in the world at that time). Unfortunately fixing leaky old pipes is not sexy for political leaders who prefer big new power projects.
So - it can be done, but depends on the reliability of the social system.
I like this game, has potential to help people think, especially about land-use, but also has issues.
However we discussed this in some detail 11 days ago (e.g. 22 comments on solarpunk),
it could be good to continue in further depth, but would feel odd to re-paste the same comments. It is a problem for Lemmy (and other social media sites), that a ‘deep’ long-term topic loses prominence too quickly, compared to ‘breaking’ news. So my question is rather general, how could we blend /gather comments across communities and across time? Meanwhile, enjoy the game (I don’t want to discourage new comments).
It’s good they exposed this network of websites - now what is going to be done to prevent them using it as intended (casual users on phones promoting soundbites to friends are not going to be checking the list in such articles…)?
Having said that, the anglosphere experienced this already in 2016 with Brexit and Trump, and such networks also promoted anti-french coups in Africa, so to ‘uncover’ this now seems rather behind the wave. A specific issue among francophone elite was their concept that to make french great again they had to focus on resisting “anglo-saxons”, so were naïvely tempted by russian narratives about a “multi-polar world”. Russia wants to divide europeans, we need to cooperate better.
Not all wetlands are methane-producing. I’d imagine that wetlands formed where ice has just retreated first have to sequester a substantial amount of carbon from the atmosphere, before they could release it back again.
Of course there are relatively small areas of greenland that have been green for a long time, so may have accumulated peat, but to imply the ex-ice-sheet will became a big methane source, just because this is an issue in other regions of the arctic (russia, canada) , seems to extrapolate too far.
We have one, it works reliably for many years, even in winter when there is sun - problem is sunny days are too rare here from Nov to Jan. If you get one, get a big tank, and optimise setup for winter (low sun angle), more than enough hot water in summer.
Lemmy Active Users looking good (discuss.tchncs.de)
Source: fedidb.org/software/lemmy
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While preserving the world’s forests is widely considered essential to combating climate change, scientists in South Africa have determined that invasive tree species are sucking up so much groundwater that the area is better off eliminating the trees.
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“Climate warming and drying is leading to these very large fire years, which then facilitate this overwintering fire activity,” Jennifer Baltzer, a biology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, told the Toronto Star.
Ducks, chickens and geese
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I have a blog where I talk mostly about all things JavaFX, but this is one of the rare times that I write about something more general:...
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