Tiresia

In the medieval city center I grew up in, there are market streets that are 6-10m wide, which are accessible for utility and delivery vehicles in the early morning. All the cars come and go before 9 AM, after which the area is pedestrianized. The market street can then be used for restaurant seating, public gatherings, market stalls, or just a spacious boulevard.

Residential streets are narrower, but still wide enough for one-way car traffic plus pedestrians (cyclists needed to dismount or go around). Utility and delivery vehicles can use these streets, blocking them for other vehicles while they're unloading, but since pedestrians and cyclists can pass it doesn't disrupt people from going about their day.

Ultimately the delivery vehicles do go to dedicated car roads, a two-lane 50 km/h ring roughly 1 kilometer in diameter around the medieval city, but that means you can walk to 3000 people's houses, as well as markets and restaurants and schools for tens of thousands of people, without crossing a car street.

This is unlikely to be sufficient to explain the spike in global sea surface temperature in recent weeks, which is around 0.2C above the prior record for this time of year.

- the article

According to the article, the drop in SO2 emissions may explain 0.02-0.035 degrees of warming in 2023, and even when it has all phased out of the atmosphere it'll be 0.03-0.06 degrees of warming.

As the representative of the ethics committee that gave the advice that was summarised into the headline we're discussing was quoted as saying in the OOP article:

These technologies do show some promise, but they are far from mature. Research must continue, but the opinion of the European Group on Ethics shows research must be rigorous and ethical, and it must take full account of the possible range of direct and indirect effects. It is also important that the scientific evidence on risks and opportunities of solar radiation modification research and deployment is periodically assessed.

No, but it will increase the fraction of total global capital that is owned by the shareholders, and isn't that what really matters?

So what you want is that all a fossil fuel company needs to do to sabotage a climate movement is to endorse someone in it?

Wasting money on bad solutions is not the same as fucking it up completely.

Also, I don't know if you're being unrealistically optimistic or unrealistically pessimistic, but there are still deeper depths to sink to than just fucking up the climate. That still has a whole range from reducing the carrying capacity of the earth to 5 billion or to 5 million or 5 thousand or zero, and there are more or less horrifying ways to handle that drop too.

Annoying that western charity is so self-aggrandizing that such an addendum is necessary, but fair. Ideally "send X" just *means *"send X and the systems to make good use of X".

Damn, this one of the big pushes of Extinction Rebellion Netherlands. Glad to see that unauthorized disruptive protest works.

They say that, but there are people out there deliberately breeding humans to keep the population up so human hunting remains justified, and these wild humans do terrible damage to the environment by over-foraging.

I fear for induced demand. If electricity is cheap, why build more efficiently? Why not do bitcoin mining or AI training?

It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't plenty of places around the world that could desperately use solar panels, that are building fossil fuel infrastructure instead. Climate change is a global problem, so the obsession with getting your individual emissions down to zero is selfish and sometimes even detrimental to the climate if "your emissions" don't include the cost of manufacturing and limited availability.

We should be sending solar panels to the developing world as fast as humanly possible, not making electricity so cheap in California that multinationals can open up a couple more data centers.

They're using hydrogen to de-rust iron, and later let the iron rust again. I don't have a degree in chemistry, but that sounds like a scam.

There are basically two sources of hydrogen that matter at an industrial scale: fossil fuel cracking (not clean energy) and electrolysing water. In the first case, if you want power it's more green to burn the fossil fuel directly.

And if you're electrolysing water and then using the hydrogen to chemically derust iron, it would (as far as i understand with high school chemistry) be strictly more efficient to electrolyse rust directly. The oxygen can dissipate into the environment or be reintroduced as necessary, like with a sacrificial metal for ship's hulls.

It's undoubtedly innovative that they have a relatively efficient way to store the latent chemical energy of hydrogen given an excess of hydrogen, but in terms of energy storage that is putting the cart before the horse.

before riots

- the post title

Glad to see their talking points focus on food security rather than agricultural companies' interests like the EU. Though I wonder if they'll come to the sensible conclusion and cut down on the meat industry.