Ben Matthews

Key message remains that methane is “the strongest lever we can quickly pull to reduce warming”.
It’s not runaway, but there is a positive feedback of methane increasing its own lifetime by using up atmospheric oxidising capacity. I note also, new to me - “an increase in decomposition rates from wetlands as higher temperatures interacted with La Niña conditions in the tropics” - so during El Niño we get more CO2 from forest fires, but during La Niña more CH4 … - how to lock-in that carbon ? I also wonder how much methane is coming from Russia recently, whose government cares the least of all.

Stability is indeed a strength of EU - effectively averaging over all the countries smooths over political oscillations - which is useful for tackling long-term policy problems (like climate). I’m not advocating majoritarian voting where 51% overrides 49%. However with ± 30 countries, one or two should not block the rest - the current system leads to transactional brinkmanship where the last hold-outs get some prize in return for postponed obstruction. I’ve seen similar (worse) problems in UN climate negotiations - also due to “consensus” principle.

Key message makes sense. But seems odd to use a photo of a Russian train to illustrate an article about Australia …

Orban is not forever - whereas integrating a country to EU is a long slow process. Also Budapest is geographically a hub city (whose inhabitants didn’t - mostly- vote for fidesz anyway). I find it hard to believe that hungarian people are so fundamentally different from their neighbours. So does it make sense to undo citizens’ EU membership for this? Rather, we need some kind of suspension of rights of the current government based on specific behaviour, such as persistent obstruction, distortion of the national media, etc. (although such criteria could apply to others too which might get embarrassing). And in general, to remove all vetos (aka “consensus”) from EU processes.

Although not an expert on that specific country, I can be sure that ’ almost all ’ is very misleading, even if it gets a lot upvotes because people find it convenient to blame some big bad other. Even if you have specific data for electricity, don’t forget a lot of CO2 is emitted by cars, and also by fuel to heat homes (including some peat in special case of ireland - and in that country a large fraction of GHG emissions is also methane from agriculture).

And did they consult the mushrooms ? Seems in medium term, may help feed a lot of bugs and birds, which is good for biodiversity, but to store carbon, needs to be fungi-proof.

Been waiting for this for 20 years … (was shocked how much those emissions rose post 2004)
What’s important now, is that India and Africa don’t follow the same type of concrete path

‘China’s in-use cement stock – a measure of all the material in buildings, roads and structures – was about the same in 2013 as the roughly 15 tonnes per person in the US’

Where can i get data for each country’s in-use cement stock ? Seems like useful metric (I think incorp in my model)

Wonder whether the popularity of the president will follow a similar pattern as in France, trying similar idea … ?

Thanks, fixed! As you can see parts of the science code are already accessible via the ‘cogs’, but not yet the structural code - anyway keeps evolving, update soon.

Note that Knesset has 120 seats (not obvious from the article). (also, of course, a large fraction of people between the river and the sea don’t get to vote for any of its seats)

Similar - I thought about codeberg for the source of my interactive climate model,
but am not yet ready to give it a pure-foss license - might split in parts with different licenses. Could try self-hosting.

Useful insight, especially country-specific part, thanks for link. Coal is still too high, but maybe we should look at seasonal usage, not assume ‘operational’ = always on. For example in China, they might be keeping excess coal capacity for occasional use during extra-cold winters ?

Good analysis. Instead of blobs for one year, try also plotting energy use/capita vs income/capita (same axes) changing over time - you see how the curves bend.

I don’t buy this. I’m still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email’s continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
Having said that, it’s a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.

It’s good to respect efforts and successes, the curves have bent and we need to explain that as it’s hard to perceive through the inertia, but the world is bigger than US, and stage eight needs a lot more elaboration …

I’m no fan of geoengineering (see this paper from 1996 ) but these specific proposals seem local, potentially reversible interventions to slow down melting, so could be worth investigating. Even if we get to net zero and stabilise the global surface temperature, it would take much longer (decades-centuries) to stabilise ice- melt, deep-ocean warming and consequent sea-level rise, there is a lot of inertia.
Their second approach focuses on meltwater, but thatt has to flow somewhere, maybe better focus to keep ice solid - e.g. I’m surprised no mention is made of the ice-surface albedo - e.g. minimising soot, algae. Minimising aviation-cirrus from planes passing over greenland might also help.

That’s great, I’m optimistic about the peaking. Nevertheless 53% coal is still far too much, and May is easy compared to cold winters. A lot of coal is also used to make steel and cement, maybe also declining, but could be good to see relative numbers.

I see that says ‘has to be local only, not federated’ (same issue also discussed on github).
‘Local only’ suggests to me front-end, i.e. info stored by browser. In that case people who are often switching devices would have to re-organise on each one, which could be tedious.
So isn’t there something in between local and federated - i.e. saved by the instance as user-settings, but not pushed to other instances?
Maybe there could be some manual copying mechanism, so a user who organises a big set of communities could share with others. (This reminds me of mastodon ‘lists’ and various ways of organising and transferring them).

Nearly 200 upthumbs, more ?!
But the discussion explores broader and narrow variants, need to coalesce.

Indeed I see too much fatalistic doomerism here on Lemmy and it’s boring - waste of potential energy. We can try to explain better - if people want to understand - that climate system is complex, actions don’t give immediately tangible results, there are many sub-systems with inertia, and indeed various types of waves too, but most of this is predictable and the pathways we have to follow are well known.
By the way about the jet-stream waves mentioned in the article, they have two sides - where I am it’s been cool recently.
More importantly, seems likely that Chinese emissions are peaking, not because they are so virtuous but because their enormous over-construction bubble involving so much steel and concrete, which was driving global emissions growth, has burst. When I was in climate negotiations years ago, we could never get the chinese to agree to talk about peaking before 2025, yet it happened. Meanwhile renewable energy expands fast around the world.
However we also reduced a lot of sulphate aerosols (both on land and from ships at sea), so we removed that temporary cooling, then on top of that we had El Niño, and have a peak in the solar cycle. The temperature spike then pushes more CO2 into the atmosphere from forests, soils and ocean, so we get bad news about atmospheric CO2, but such feedbacks happened before and are in the models, it’s not unexpected or out of control yet.