Ben Matthews

Back in 2011, I with my young family took a local bus north from Mariana, which diverted through several villages including that one Bento Rodrigues just below the dam, soon to be washed away. Through gaps in the trees we could glimpse those huge orange lakes just behind earth dams - it was obvious even to a casual tourist that it was a disaster waiting to happen. But the bus was run by the mining company, like all services around there, I suppose that’s why people didn’t complain more.
By the way I was told Brazil didn’t even make much from iron mines, as most of raw ore was exported to China, which got the real value.

Emissions grew in 2023, that’s not the same as ‘are now growing’. There is a good chance global CO2 emissions fall in 2024, mainly due to trends in China. Of course it takes time to gather data, but NS should be more careful with the headline.
The spinscore link has useful refs - but keeps mixing up CO2 emissions with “CO2 equivalents” including methane, landuse and minor gases. Methane rising is a big issue, but might potentially be turned around faster. Regarding landuse, deforestation was exacerbated last year by El Niño feedbacks - it’s hard to separate the anthropogenic part of these fluxes.
Rather than simple headlines which encourage fatalistic doom, it’s more useful to explain how some factors progress better than others. They are right to highlight growth in road transport and aviation (even if some growth still covid-rebound), although more effort still needed in all sectors.

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.

Odd that Estacio de França is now the terminus only of lines from the opposite direction - but it makes sense to run all across the centre.

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)?

Indeed to use scala-native you’d need pure-scala libraries, but the core lib re-implements most java lib, and there are now small simple external libs available for common tasks like file management, database, etc. - for example check out the lihaoyi suite.
I mainly use scala-js (to make this) which was formerly a java app - as it compiles to both js and jvm (cross-project) can gradually convert stuff you already wrote. I’ve tried native for stuff like pre-processing data files.

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.

Scala compiles either to native, js or jvm - obviously the IO / interface options vary between these envs, but the lang is the same. Recently Scala 3.5 incorporates a simple-to-use CLI which makes it easier to compile to native (or just run a small file as a script, or experiment with a repl), native binaries are small and fast, and there are some simple io libraries. Since you can also compile to jvm to interop with java, that might help with transition.

I now use Scala 3, and very happy with syntactic whitespace (combined with an intelligent compiler)

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 …?

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

Well, in most countries wind and solar are rapidly growing compared to hydro. A more critical question for India is what else could replace the melting Himalayan glaciers and reducing snow cover, as a storage of water for the dry season?

Well written!

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).

Scala-js is working on it - as its compiler design may facilitate this.
I haven’t yet tried (on todo list) and am not an expert, but bookmarked in passing:
recent github implementation, some history, following older discussion