Some good digging - indeed it is hard to understand all the different ways to define and interpret climate sensitivity.
Some good digging - indeed it is hard to understand all the different ways to define and interpret climate sensitivity.
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 makes sense. But seems odd to use a photo of a Russian train to illustrate an article about Australia …
Wonder whether the popularity of the president will follow a similar pattern as in France, trying similar idea … ?
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)
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 ?
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.
So, what do we do with the greenest areas? Cover them with splodges of grey, of course…
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.
Even if we had low-emissions, low-noise, low-accident cars, there’d still be the concrete jungle surface needed to drive them - and loads of emissions to make the steel and cement of highways.
Although cars carrying four or more people directly to a medium-distance destination can be relatively efficient per pers-km, people buy oversized cars imagining some dream holiday, then use them for daily life on one-person trips that (electric-) bicycles and/or trains could do - car-sharing could help avoid that and solve the EV-range issue (although personally, my dream holidays would be in places with no cars at all).
Well, maybe not just wait … Some factors will fall back - e.g. El Niño is a cycle, so are sunspots, ocean patches go round in (big-slow) loops, forests can run out of tinder (for a while). But to be sure to tip the balance of those climate-carbon feedbacks we need to get the temperature down - this could be done quicker by focusing especially on emissions of shorter-lived gases - mainly methane. Cutting out aviation-induced cirrus might also help to cancel some of the warming we got from cutting shipping sulphate - the opposite effect is because low clouds cause net cooling, high clouds cause net warming (depending on angle of sun etc. …). The good news is that models already include most of these factors, the bad news is that models say we have to cut emissions much faster than we do.
Global directly-anthropogenic CO2 emissions - things we measure and attribute to countries - have been flat in the period 2019-23 (except for covid dip), and maybe falling this year (due to changes in China). However there are also climate -> carbon feedbacks. The most obvious are forest fires which tend to peak during El Niño years (it’s a repeating pattern - I even remember 1998 seeming bad). Heating also enhances respiration by bugs in soils, and reduces the solubility of CO2 in seawater - the ocean is the largest and most long-term CO2 sink. El Niño also changes ocean circulation temporarily, but I forget which way this impacts CO2 (it’s not trivial - you have to think about the history and future of large patches of water).
So, if known emissions are flat, but there is a record increase in the atmosphere, that means those feedbacks are worse.
It takes a while to disentangle the factors, but this is not a surprise to me.
So that suggests, over 4 tons CO2 per tank-refill. Many of those things don’t get to roll very far (except by train, ship), but there’s still over 120 tons embodied CO2 just from producing the (mainly) steel. Also the energy in the shells.
I guess military planes, ships, missiles contribute more than tanks. Should also consider albedo effects such as smoke drifting over arctic snow.
But maybe this is all dwarfed by the implied emissions of reconstruction later, also missed opportunities for cooperation on global mitigation efforts.
The key new info is not the decadal trend, it’s ‘not yet risen beyond pre-pandemic levels’ - in other words global emissions are ± flat. More recent info (also from carbonbrief) suggests that China’s emissions may now be falling (and therefore likely global too -as China was such a large fraction of recent growth). On the other hand feedbacks from high temperatures in 2023 - forest fires, ocean circulation etc., made the atmospheric CO2 rise break another record, but several temporary factors (e.g. reduced shipping sulphate, El Nino, solar cycle, etc.) contributed to that spike.
Of course all emissions should be counted. It’s not just the explosions and burning oil, I’d guess that manufacturing all the steel and chemicals also uses loads of energy. Some stockpiles used now may be associated with emissions long ago, e.g. in the last decades of the soviet union emissions rose very high, even while the economy was low.
Trying to imagine what’s the application of mats of electric seaweed - if the energy could somehow make them self propelling, and self replicating, could get interesting, big potential surface area …?