gorpovitch
Stepping out of fossil fuels means a great deal of industrial and civilizational change, which takes a lot of time. But things do change.
In these days, what we need is for people to take action (from voting and raising their voices in the media, to working on how to live in a sustainable way as a civilization), and promote a positive message that others will follow. Depression-inducing articles like this one risks to prevent people from believing in a decent future, and thus persuade them to stop caring and acting for a better world.
My brother, who has three kids, tried out a SUV which had an electric hatchback, where you have to trigger the trunk closing with a button. With a manual hatchback he could fill all the luggage in the trunk and just slam the door, without any problem. But now the electric hatchback would not close if the car felt there was a luggage in the way.
In the end they had to remove the luggage, close the trunk and fill the trunk from the side doors.
The earth is a dynamic system, and the rate of temperature growth is as much, if not more, important than temperature average here. A car going from 100 to 0 kmph in 15 seconds is definitely not the same as a car going from 100 to 0 kmph in 0.1 seconds in terms of damage.
the temperature rises described in the article (e.g. during the eocene) are about a few degrees every few hundreds of thousands of years. Flore and fauna had time to evolve.
Today we are talking about 4 degrees in less than a hundred years. That's more than thousand times faster.
Code With Me – Ultimate collaborative development by JetBrains
Become a volunteer as a first-aid responder. You will learn and practice how to react in a lot of unusual situations (kids choking, burns, wounds, people fainting...), learn more about healthcare-related subjects, and live incredibly unusual experiences. It's a highly rewarding skillset.
I'm doing this manually using Stylus for facebook and twitter. It's unbelievable how healthier it made my consumption of these sites. I couldn't find stylus for mobile firefox though...
No news feed. No passive content consumption. Still got pages, events, groups, messages etc. Can still use the website in an active/socializing way (looking for specific things, seeing relevant friends' notifications and invitations) but without being caught by the feed each time I come to check my notifications. Think I'll do the same with pretty much every social network. Content feeds are the worst.
Getting a scientific prize for open-source software
What is energy, actually? (2011)
Second, the problem here is not only the total temperature variation but the speed at which the temperature is changing.
Think of the difference between a car going from 130 km/h to 0 km/h in 8 seconds, and a car going from 130 km/h to 0 km/h in 0.3 seconds. Not really endearing.
https://theshiftproject.org/en/home/
It's a think tank working on handling the climate crisis with excellent, pragmatic, efficiency-focused studies, without ideologies or dogma. They have recently been known to put some numbers on the CO2 emissions caused by the digital industry, that is less visible but very real (4 percent of total emissions, 4x more than air travel!)
They have Jean-Marc Jancovici in the management, who also founded Carbone 4 - a consulting firm working on enabling companies to make their transition to a carbon-neutral world. He's an original figure among ecologists in France because he pleads in favor of nuclear energy in France, to avoid emitting CO2 (it's mainly thanks to nuclear energy that France emits 7 times less CO2 for the same amount of electricity produced compared to the OECD). I highly recommend his conferences.
I would really like (not intended at HN, it's a general crisis in my life) to read more articles about politics that are neutral and factually oriented. It seems like 90% of the political content I read twists facts and build cheap, cherry-picked arguments to push for their opinions without any scientifical / logical humility (Discussing hypotheses, advancing honest counter arguments...). I am yet to find political writers / journalists raising questions without already knowing the answers to them. Real thinking instead of outrage porn (as another commenter wrote ; I like that expression)