Good article, it makes sense to plan heat-pumps on a larger scale, hope support for such initiatives survives russian disinfo.
Couldn’t they pump some heat directly from the Danube, or would that be too problematic for ecology and countries downstream ?
Which U.S. is trying? At least with a legal process in London, there is some hope it continues.
I’d guess the chinese dam is rather an excuse, and the real motivation is electricity - potentially a lot from that river, although that end of Assam doesn’t yet have a huge population to use it. Also, the Brahmaputra riverbed is wide but variable, so maybe they hope by taming it they can grow crops there. But there must be a huge amount of sediment, what’s going to happen to that?
Strange that Genoa controlled off bits of coast (yellow) all the way to Crimea, Azov sea (is Tana now Azov?) , and Circassia, how did they manage all that? And who’s in that purple-coloured “Theodoro”?
Sure it will, there’s a lot of inertia and feedbacks in the system, some kicking in recently although there’s nothing physically special about 1.5oC. Also, as well as CO2, emissions of CH4 rise fast, while those of SOx fall. My point is rather that people (especially anglophones) tend to over-estimate the importance of USA in world affairs. What matters is that the rest of the world gets on with transitions.
Wave some red flags to distract the bull, what happened to the matador ?
IIrc this has been going back and forth for years.
Does Rwanda ever explain what they are trying to achieve - permanently take over both sides of the lake ?
What kind of government would local people without guns prefer ?
(Goma is far from Kinshasa, closer even to Indian ocean).
Is it? Bush withdraw from Kyoto protocol, Trump already withdrew from PA. This game just became a predictable cycle, a bit like El Niño, the rest of the world got used to the unreliability of bipolar USA, which reduces their negotiating strength. Meanwhile regarding ambition for future emissions, what matters most for the next set of targets at COP30 is China and India (the former at peak due over-construction, and higher per-capita than Europe, the latter relatively low, but set to rise fast if there is no change of direction). We can wait out USA (but please sort out your bipolar system) - 4 years is not long in climate.
OK good, but to be really pioneering change in francophone world, they need to leave Meta too, that’s what dominates.
Split it? I hear that the Kazakh side of the sea grows again, even though the Uzbek side turned to cotton.
Methane is a big problem, tackling CH4 may be the only fast enough way to reduce peak warming. Also, by using up atmospheric oxisidising capacity, CH4 increases it’s own lifetime (i.e. the more we put in the air, the longer it hangs around) - a problematic positive feedback. First priority of course is to tackle the obvious emissions (especially from fossil installations - many in russia as well as usa) but it’s still worth studying what might be done to reduce atmospheric CH4. Seems this proposal is not an effective solution, but partly a question of time and place .
Where are these mammoths meant to roam ? And does anybody get why they think trampling grass and snow is going to protect permafrost ?
It’s interesting that the rise at Mauna Loa is a bit higher than the global average. From such differences one gets a clue about the origins (useful as regional biospheric and oceanic sources and sinks are still hard to quantify precisely). I note also that they are predicting a lower rise in 2025. So, if I read it correctly, there’s a small sign of hope that the trend may get better, as the factors which contributed to this anomalous rise were more in the early part of 2024, related to the earlier El Niño. Unless the latter returns again soon - keep an eye on the pacific heat.
It’s good that people outside any big system continue efforts to preserve suppressed history and memories, in hope of re-integration later.
I add only that the message could gain strength from comparisons with other cultural groups and periods of history.
Regarding the worst man-made disasters, the two world wars usually top such a list, sometimes followed by the Taiping ‘rebellion’, which is too-often forgotten in the west but still spooks chinese leaders. Although on a slightly smaller scale, disasters led by the previous regime such as the 1938 yellow-river floods were pretty bad too. Looking further west, and a couple of decades earlier than the “Great Leap”, Holodomor followed a rather similar pattern. And before we conclude the pattern depends on a certain type of government, people in Congo, Bengal, Ireland, Native Americans, plenty of other examples, might have something to say about extreme-capitalist alternatives. Also if we start to analyse potential ‘failed-to-be-born’ numbers on a global multi-century scale, we’d have some interesting results, and the alternative scenarios might not be so attractive either.
Yes, we need to resist propaganda from big powers, but currently those also include big-tech in the usa, pushing some other strange ideas about which majorities should dominate which minorities. Indeed as human nature evolves less than technology, so we must learn from history. So I’m not trying to deny any tragic situation by ‘whataboutism’, only to take a long-term global perspective.
Returning to central asia, there is great potential for a better future, but life there does depend strongly on irrigation from diminishing snow and icecaps on the mountains. Response to such externally-driven factors may need big engineering as well as traditional cultural wisdom, so change is inevitable, although it’s wrong that technocrats impose it by coercion. I remember in better times, at a railway station in the desert, watching chinese characters alternating with arabic script, they can flow together. Maybe the surprisingly rapid and apparently cooperative changes in Syria suggest hope for that region.
Indeed trade links relevant, so navigable rivers played a big role - before railways, our main transport was either boats or horses (or camels). Horses needed a lot of grass, which thrives in drier mid-continental climates where trees don’t survive wildfires. For example the Mongol empire was good at trade and connecting cultures, covered a huge area, but not (for long) near coasts, and still demanded intense tribal loyalty (elements of such culture was absorbed by the next empire which gradually pushed it back…).
It’s now decades too late to choose between climate mitigation and adaptation, we have to do both. This includes that more people will inevitably migrate to more ‘climate-safe’ regions. The challenge is to help that process be more gradual and equitable, which includes some issues you raise. For example development of new homes creates opportunities, including jobs, but older landowners may benefit disproportionally.
This is a global issue, not specific to USA, but given that context, while I also have little sympathy for billionaires with seaside palaces in Florida, such people are few, and it’s also hard to feel sympathy for populations in the midwest who collectively voted for decades for climate-denying politicians who blocked effective policies, even influentially on a global scale.
This is difficult. Yes we should discourage further mis-investment in unsustainable locations. Including whole cities, which may still be liveable for a few more decades, but not centuries. On the other hand, by pushing down market sale prices, this penalises people whose ancestors moved there, long before we knew much about climate change. So maybe they should get some compensation or help to move, although on such timescales there are plenty of other ‘bad-luck’ factors that society doesn’t compensate.
Maybe add some major tributaries - eg the Inn, Sava, Tisza … ? Sometimes, depending rain on the mountains, these have greater water flow.
I think if you plotted political inclination as a function of distance from coast, globally, you might find quite a good correlation. Various plausible explanations. For example, in tougher mid-continental climates you need to store and protect stuff to survive the winter / dry-season, so people there evolved (including self-filtering migration) to have more tribal loyalty.
I recently switched to Mill, after years with sbt - find it easier to customise as my project gets more complex. But I’m using it mainly for scala.js ( retain the structure to compile a jvm version too, but rarely using that, may switch to scala-native for probabilistic calculations and data-processing, for which I used to use jvm).