[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

That's a pity, I had been expecting level or a slight decrease in fossil CO2 (due to economy in China which has 1/3 of emissions), so maybe I was wrong, or maybe it's just too soon to say (they give error range -0.3% to +1.9%). There's still 1/6th of 2024 to go, including part of the NH winter whose heating demand varies with weather, most of the raw data that goes into these calculations is likely not so fresh, and chinese economic projections tend to be 'optimistic'. The rise in LUC CO2 is mainly hangover from tail of El Niño early this year, leading to fires in southern hemisphere. So it's still possible, if we think monthly, that the global peak was early this year, i.e. in the past.
Of course, they release GCB before the end of the year to try to influence the COP, which makes more sense when the COP is in mid-December (as typical, but not necessary - iirc COP1 was April and COP2 July). But does projected bad news really help motivate the world? I'd emphasise mixed news - some trends up, others down, which shows what difference we can make.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 3 points 6 days ago

Och some things never change ... at least Ed Uni had the same reputation when I was a student there from 1990, but in reality this mainly applied to humanities departments - in chemistry, geology, agric, etc. down at the 'King's buildings', it was mostly Scottish students. Overall a fine diversity.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 31 points 1 month ago

Hmm. I'm still using a 2014 iMac, as its 27" 5k screen still very good for coding (with added memory). Sometimes develops a bunch of thin vertical lines, which come and go maybe dependent on temperature, but hasn't changed for for ten years and i can live with those. Just wish they'd continue providing security updates for it.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 50 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 23 points 5 months ago

That's interesting. I wonder whether those 6519 surveyed are representative of whole population, or of people who anyway online a lot. It’s seems there was an inflection around 2012 - what happened then ? The curve ends during covid lockdowns, wonder whether deflected since ?

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 41 points 5 months ago

"...at a rate of roughly 0.05 percent per day ... would take a very long time" ... but by my quick calculation 0.9995^3650 is 84% per decade, which is not long. Almost instantaneous on a geological timescale - and think how much the world changed when fungi learned how to digest lignin in wood - ending the era of coal-forming swamps.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 23 points 8 months ago

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).

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 24 points 9 months ago

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.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 34 points 9 months ago

My boys have chromebooks, it’s almost mandatory for school now, and I get why teachers need the whole class to have a similar locally-networked tool. Problem is we as parents can't set anything, as we don't have 'developer' access, and the school controls their accounts. So at home, they do stupid stuff. The hardware is ok, I wish it was just linux. About what google gets - I doubt the current data is so valuable, they play a long game hoping to lock young people into their ecosystem, to profit from people with cash/energy in their 20s.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 24 points 11 months ago

Hi, just an inter-generational message:

25 years ago, I used to be a colleague of a lead author of that report. Like the others, he flew to global conferences, gradually built up a portfolio of papers, and so became a a famous professor with an interesting life, and can now release such reports with obvious timing to influence COP28 (and thereby get government support for the team to continue such research projects...).
But the contents are not really "news", most of this was predictable by those of us who knew the science back then 25 years ago, which was also reported the hottest year for a millenium. My thoughts then were similar to some of those some you write below (->above?). So I went to protests, and (by train, bicycle) to COPs to try to bridge the gap between science and policy, and instead of papers tried to spread knowledge via interactive web tools (really new tech then). I didn't nurture a career, because I didn't expect society to survive for so long. I assisted for a while near the core of IPCC and EU policy, but without papers and flights for networking, was easily disposable. Now 25 years later I sit shivering, in relative poverty, with little influence. To keep trying, I revive my interactive climate model (admittedly needs much more at the impacts end - no such big team), still hoping such tools could communicate something papers don't. I'm not judging who was right, just telling younger people - be aware this is a long-term game.

As I wrote in another post recently, tipping points are real, but thresholds vary by region and sector, and we don't know them accurately. So if you integrate over risk you get a curve - non-linear of course, but not showing that any year is particularly special - unless we make it so, socially.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 33 points 11 months ago

EU needs to abandon unanimity in decision making - it's not even the veto of one "country", but of one party in one country. Same for UN. Pure consensus is not working.

[-] benjhm@sopuli.xyz 22 points 1 year ago

It's not passing such a milestone that's an issue, so much as how fast we pass it - i.e. a population decline is sustainable if gradual. My concern is that our models of economics and governance derive from previous centuries when population was rapidly growing, which helped provide social mobility and influence for younger generations. So we need to adjust economics and governance to compensate, to avoid stagnation and gerontocracy.

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benjhm

joined 1 year ago