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Ben Matthews @ benjhm @sopuli.xyz
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130
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2 yr. ago

  • Depends whose lifetime. Mine, maybe not, but for my children - yes. Also depends what indicator - global CO2 emissions maybe falling this year, but temperature will lag decades, sea-level even more (btw I do model these scenarios, so know well how they diverge ).

  • Nice graphic. Although probably you'd see more info with just a lineplot, separating north / south + land /ocean. What strikes me is how regular the gap is over the last year, and how it bulges most in July-December, which suggests the ocean (larger and less variable) dominates the numbers, with El Niño overlaid on steady warming trend. To get it back down quickly, we need more effort on short lived gases - mainly methane (tackling aviation-indeed cirrus might also help compensate for reduced ship-sulphate cooling ) .

  • That's great progress, thanks for all the work!
    Glad to see enhanced federation with rest of fediverse - a small detail : the link for 'Automatically includes a hashtag with new posts' should point to pull #4533 (not #4398 ) - should help discoverability from mastodon, especially if community tags become customisable.

  • "...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.

  • Hi, excuse me for replying so late, but i've been away from lemmy for.a while. Well, to summarise, the model calculates the future trajectories, of population, economy, emissions, atmospheric gases, and climate response etc., according to a set of (hundreds of) diverse options and uncertainties which you can adjust - the key feature is that the change shows rapidly enough to let you follow cause -> effect, to understand how the system responds in a quasi-mechanical way.
    Indeed you are right, complexity is beautiful, but hard. A challenge with such tools is to adjust gradually from simple to complex. Although SWIM has four complexity levels, they are no longer systematically implemented - also what seems simple or complex varies depending where each person is coming from, so i think to adapt the complexity filter into a topic-focus filter. Much todo ...

  • As it happens I've been calculating per capita emissions for 28 years, since COP2. You can see my model here.
    No I certainly don't include Russia nor Turkey, although europe is more than EU. Korea is indeed notable. Regarding what they call 'consumption emissions', you can get such data from Global Carbon Project, on that I'm less an expert but my hunch is that industry emissions are dominated by heavy products like steel and cement for construction (made with help of gigatons of coal), rather than light consumer goods for export. Over-construction is the root of the problem, global emissions will peak (maybe now) as that bubble bursts.

  • Yes they invested enormously in high-speed train lines. But look on satellite image around those train stations, new city blocks have massive roads everywhere, 5 lanes in each direction, plus in parallel another set of toll roads. Even if those roads were empty , the cement and steel for all that has contributed enormous quantity of CO2 to the atmosphere.
    Chinese emissions per capita are higher than european average for many years now, however they always pick the worst country in the world for comparison statistics.

  • I can relate to this, having developed a coupled socio-emissions-carbon-climate model, which evolved for 20 years in java, until recently converted to scala3. You can have a look here. The problem is that "coupling" in such models of complex systems is a 'good' thing, as there are feedbacks - for example atmospheric co2 drives climate warming but the latter also changes the carbon cycle, demography drives economic growth but the latter influences fertility and migration, etc.. (some feedbacks are solved by extrapolating from the previous timestep - the delay is anyway realistic). There are also policy feedbacks - between top-down climate-stabilisation goals, and bottom up trends and national policies, the choice affects the logical calculation order. All this has to work fast within the browser (now scala.js - originally java applet), responding interactively to parameter adjustments, only recalculating curves which changed - getting all these interactions right is hard.
    If restarting in scala3 I'd structure it differently, but having a lot of legacy science code known to work, it’s hard to pull it apart. Wish I'd known such principles at the beginning, but as it grew gradually, one doesn't anticipate such complexity.

  • This is an unprecedented situation - if a guy who's in prison (speaking via AI) and whose party is not allowed on electoral lists can nevertheless win an election , think which other countries might also be inspired by this ... ! (note - although I'm not so keen on Khan (populist), am even less keen on military rule). I suppose now it depends which way PPP and MQM will turn ?

  • The problem is that whatever careful process EU implements to restrict spread of fake news etc., authoritarian states will copy its facade and terminology, to justify their own censorship of real news ( in Russia people go to prison for calling a war a war).

  • There is no climate panacea, only baskets of solutions. Bamboo has remarkable properties from an engineering pov - strong light hollow tubes, and so could be used more to substitute for plastics and metals, in relatively short-lived products (which most are). You are right that it's not so durable as wood from trees, and it’s more suited to wet climates. I have several kinds in my garden, green in winter, grape vines dangle along it in summer, a shallow root barrier (old tiles) contain it.