Ben Matthews

Actually, if you swapped ‘on’ for ‘by’ (and cut ‘US diminishment’ etc.) you’d have a point there - Russian emissions per capita are among the world’s highest and growing, while they decline in the rest of the north - most commentators don’t notice as Russia has no NGOs left to shout about it.
(Note emissions fell since 1992 but from an even higher peak - while soviet industry produced that huge stockpile of missiles, tanks etc. now being used up). Also there are potentially huge climate feedbacks in Siberian forests and tundra, and we should be cooperating globally to help manage that. Maybe ‘europe from lisbon to vladivostok’ was a missed opportunity. I crossed siberia by train, helping local scientists attend COP3 in Japan, even studied many russian songs. Maybe one day we’ll cooperate again. But now I and many others here think the only way to end these wars, is for russians to dump their crazy leadership which started them.

I’m not an expert on biodiversity, although I’d like to be. Of course extinction is forever, and habitat loss is exacerbated by climate feedbacks. But we have to accept change, making less fuss about protecting ‘native species’ (to me this feels rather like nativism wrt human immigration), and recognise that life on earth has suffered and survived worse calamities in geological history, so it will re-adapt to new situations, if we let plants and animals (including ourselves) move with the climate. We can’t save all the old ecosystems (for example from considering thermodynamics of the symbiosis within coral reefs, I have little hope for their survival with combination of higher T and CO2 and SLR), but we might help create new opportunities for new ecosystems in new places. In this context, what matters is the rate of changes - as it takes time for trees to grow, soil to accumulate - rather than ‘equilibrium’ changes.
I don’t know whether the OP was specifically reacting to lack of progress at the Biodiv COP16 in Cali, as well as US election and climate news, but as an old hand at COPs too, I hadn’t expected much, at the end of these circuses the only certainty is that the show must always go on (or diplomatic teams would kill their own job). In my opinion both COP processes have got bogged down talking mainly about money, and the UN system as a whole has not been working for many years, so we need some radical rethinking about global cooperation. Nevertheless on a local and regional level plenty of positive things are still happening. Also human population growth is also peaking, or heading that way, on all continents except Africa, and in many countries there is reforestation recently.
In general, bear in mind that many big science consortiums publish reports around this time of year, with extra-worrying headlines, in a bid to influence the COP processes. This is just part of the new-normal seasonal cycle, like the grey skies where I live, but not a reason to lose hope - brighter days will follow.

Hey, I study curves of climate change for decades now, and can tell you there is hope.
The world probably just passed peak global emissions - mainly due to China, which counts for a lot more than USA, whose emissions were falling anyway - that trend may slow down but not stop - as renewables are cheaper now. China is manufacturing most renewable stuff now, but the science that drove the transition was led by europe and US, the work wasn’t wasted. Indeed, peak emissions is not peak concentration, and there’s a lot of inertia in the deep ocean and ice-caps, so temperatures will keep rising during my lifetime, but peak temperature, at least below 2ºC, is foreseeable now, we are succeeding to bend those curves.
That wasn’t the case when I lost hope, due to the gap between climate science and policy, back in late 1990s. But I’m still alive now, and glad of it, and would like to stay around longer to see how the future evolves, only wish I’d prepared better for later life, as it’s a long path, not easy but challenges can be inspiring, no simple answers but the complexity is beautiful. Keep going.

I’m aware of the racism issue, I even observed it myself in China, even many years ago.
But i’ve also seen similar problems in other corners of the world. Such cultural concepts can change slowly, as they did over here.
Anyway, I doubt this would dissuade people trying to connect what will become the world’s main supply of surplus young labour, with the world’s greatest demand for care-services, combined with spare apartments, money, and a milder climate. Not saying it’s good or bad, just trying to anticipate future changes.

I agree. For global discussions, are many Indians going to learn Chinese, Swahili, Hausa, Arabic, and vice-versa ? Meanwhile international-english is the new latin… Even within India, the south insists to keep english as an official language, to avoid being dominated by more populous hindi-speaking north.
Alternatively LLM-translation may facilitate multi-lingual discussion, but in this case the language of software development may still be influential during such transition.
By the way - this is an important topic for future of lemmy, which should expand more towards the south - where’s a good place to develop it (beyond such set of replies)?

That seems like a big change in one year. It may to some extent reflect delay, as on average chinese used to pair-up at a younger age than typical in europe, also maybe some feel old traditions aren’t necessary to keep a stable family with children. But the article says, the core factors are economic. Even so, as they have built so many surplus apartments, the [real] prices must drop, I wonder how many years before they are trying to sell the chinese dream to migrants from Africa or elsewhere.

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.

I’ve been calculating and struggling with climate change for - well, seems a long time now.
As a young man, I didn’t expect that world society would survive as long as it has, I thought climate was existential now - in the 1990s - so I tackled what I could then, rather than planning for my life decades later (which is consequently not easy).
But we’re still here, and actually the range of scenarios looks somewhat better now than projections back then.
Probably emissions in China have just peaked, and as these are such a big chunk of the global total over last 20 years, so that may have peaked too. Global science and civil society has, collectively, helped to influence that. We have bent the curves. Of course there is inertia in the system, it takes time for carbon and heat to penetrate the deep ocean and the ice, so the surface temperature will continue to rise for decades, but not necessarily for centuries - that’s still our choice. Yes, some megacities will drown beneath the sea, and others become uninhabitable due to heatwaves and drought, but there will be plenty of other places to live, we’ll need some redistribution. Many other species will be (and have been) lost, but life on earth has survived worse catastrophes, life will go on.
Especially people who care about such future, who educate themselves about the challenges, yourself included, should be part of that. But it’s a long-term problem, without quick-fixes, so plan accordingly, saving some strength for later, we’ll still need it.

I like some concepts and design of Mbin, something to learn from, but I’d believe more in its growth potential if not written mainly in php.

Interesting observation and analysis, and illustrates the potential of more lemmy-mastodon interaction.
Indeed mdon like-federation seems weird but I presume it was setup this way for efficiency, to reduce the number of small communications? Although Lemmy has a backend in rust - more efficient than mdon’s ruby - still I wonder whether the lemmy system of federating all upvotes would scale well if the number of users grows to that of mastodon and beyond ? Could there be some intermediate compromise solution (e.g. federate batches of 100 likes)?

I didn’t discover Lemmy through search, nor did I ever use reddit - I found it from mastodon where a few people promote lemmy posts. Then gradually realised I preferred the community-focus here, compared to the individual-focus of mdon (although combining both could be good). As mdon has many more users, improving this inter-op would help to bring people here.

Some good digging - indeed it is hard to understand all the different ways to define and interpret climate sensitivity.

Indeed that’s strange, and the flat slope in 2060 seems inconsistent with declared net-zero policies of China and even India. Russia has no such policy, but still strange to assume continuation of current government concepts there until 2060. (you can see the regional breakdown in supplem Fig 1. )

Regarding the map - an annual average cost is not so meaningful - in higher latitudes solar is not enough in winter - especially where it’s mostly cloudy during the first half of winter. Wind helps the balance but not everywhere, always. Of course, the sophisticated models behind the article know all that, the issue is simplistic presentation. I note “we assume hydrogen is used for seasonal storage” - this may be rather optimistic - how many dark months can that cover?

Clearly there’s a big gap between greenwash rhetoric and practical reality, but that’s not unusual all over the world. The big question here is not the design of the central buildings, but whether it makes sense, as long-term sustainable development, to relocate the capital, and it seems to me there are arguments both ways. Jakarta is low-lying, literally sinking into the rising sea, and the island of Java is overcrowded - so something had to change. The new capital will lead to some deforestation on Borneo, on the other hand by bringing elites nearby they may re-evaluate the value of the jungle, it could be harder to hide destruction. The new location has potential for sea transport, but may lead to an over-dependence on air-transport.
Maybe useful to compare with other countries that moved their capital for geographical balance, and to avoid rising sea-level and overcrowding, for example Lagos to Abuja, or the new egyptian constructions SE of Cairo.

Also the global impact would likely be much greater, due to the co-operation factor.
On the other hand, there is a time-lag to policy impact, also exogenous surprises (superimposing past presidents on that plot may be revealing).

It slows down, an effect of cold water from melting ice passing south of greenland, which has a local cooling effect, while the atlantic as a whole gets warmer. Consequence is a greater heat contrast along that front, which may intensify the sequence of low pressures bringing wind and rain, which is what Ireland has just experienced this summer. But the high-resolution models do not show that AMOC stops abruptly, that was a feature of simpler models designed to replicate palaeoclimatic changes at the end of the ice ages, when the amount of ice available to melt was much higher.

Ireland has a long coastline but most of it near mountains, so there is fortunately scope to gradually retreat uphill. The large flat part is in the middle - the central Shannon basin is only 35m above sea-level, but unless East Antarctica goes too, that’s safe for the moment. As for temperature rise, it’s a cool country that may expect relatively little warming, due to the cold blob south of greenland, at least while ice continues melting. So, Ireland may need to prepare for large influx of people escaping heat elsewhere.

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.

I agree. The key symbiosis between coral and microalgae depends on fundamental thermodynamic equilibria of the carbonate chemistry of seawater - which are highly sensitive to temperature and atmospheric CO2, in very predictable ways. When living in coral becomes unprofitable for the algae, they leave. My instinct, from some experience with this system, is that introducing new species won’t do better than nature, nobody can beat thermodynamics. We have to reduce the CO2.