Well, it’s a kind of stretched thought experiment, to imagine they had precise satellite-like temperature measurements in those days. But if you really want to ask, when did humans first have a discernible influence on the climate, it surely goes back much earlier than that - due to deforestation and associated changes in albedo (as well as CO2), also desertification in some regions (north africa?). I don’t see albedo or land-use change in this paper, only fossil emissions.
At the same time, Ethiopia is also creating a huge new lake, capturing the headwaters of the Nile, it’s far away across mountains to the NW, but maybe one day they’ll be transferring water ?
For many of them it’s still far away. But I note the ukrainian counter of russian casualties is about to pass a million. While there is ‘fog of war’ it’s easier to say people are missing, so friends and relatives can keep hoping that theirs is the special case. During any prolonged ceasefire, it would become clearer who’s gone forever - which is one reason why P avoids this situation (and also bans NGOs like soldier’s mothers, who used to help connect these dots).
Well, technically the internet backbone is already controlled locally, it’s the web services - software - that are dominated by US big-tech. And for such services to be safe we need a diversity of providers, not only local ones maybe easily coerced by our own national governments, some of which might also try to turn authoritarian in future. So the problem is not that US big-tech participates, rather that we let them become almost a monopoly.
What happened to Assam and beyond ?
Hope you are right, but depends on the power balance after the election, and whether federal or provincial law decides such things.
Isn’t Alberta is more aligned to MAGA politically? Maybe tries to stir up a big provocation, then eventually ‘annex’ it.
It seems so far Zed is cautious, providing api only for specific extensions - i.e. language servers and gui themes.
add a line … right before you run it
I run stuff from the command line using a trusted build tool (Mill, in scala), or via a local server (where js is sandboxed).
But indeed, a tricky language server or AI tool (I don’t use yet) might inject code where I don’t inspect before running it.
That’s a risk even with java-based IDEs - java has security permissions, not in js (vscode) or rust (zed), but are they applied…?
As for audits, a problem with vscode is the marketplace got too big, so many extensions, many lookalikes, nobody can check them all…
Such tricks were was predictable, as VSCode extensions, letting arbitrary JS run on your system, are an obvious security risk.
Recently I used Zed editor instead, it’s smooth, but this also has extensions, only these are fewer and in rust ( maybe a higher barrier, targeting less users, so far… ). What’s the solution here - is there some intrinsically safer sandboxed system ?
Important topic. If more effort had been put earlier into lie-defence, maybe they’d need less air-defence.
But I’m confused by this part - seems contradictory, can anybody clarify - does he have roles for people to fill, or not ?
Nonetheless, Ukraine needs a new training and certification scheme, Potiy said, ambitiously aiming at fostering a new generation of cyber security specialists, “tens of thousands if not more,” with solid jobs within Ukraine. It is one of his core ambitions for his first year in charge of the agency. “We have educational institutions that turn out cybersecurity specialists who could provide services,” Potiy continued. “But there’s no job market.”
They say the other side (favour US over Ukraine) is only 20% - so 48:20 is a big difference ( in such surveys, there are always plenty who don’t know or hedge bets - and many people just don’t think beyond their local world) .
It seems the problem is the regional governments , which are prioritising regional coal mining, to prioritise regional jobs. In China there is plenty of renewable energy capacity but the sun and wind are mainly in the W and S, while the old coal mines are in the E and N. China has plenty of climate scientists and diplomats pushing central government policy, but these have less influence on ‘local government’. As many ‘local governments’ in China govern populations larger than European countries, this is something like Poland trying to keep it’s coal mines alive, in contradiction to European climate policy. Eventually there will be surplus energy, some coal contracts are going to break, question is who wins and loses then. Western observers tend to think of China as a big centrally controlled monolith - it isn’t, the ‘local’ chiefs have a lot of power. Similar central / ‘local’ governance problem with housing bubble and debt.
Potentially (ok - not currently), “24 gigatons of carbon accumulated in methane hydrates” is a serious amount. Note that as methane increases in the atmosphere, it’s lifetime increases as oxidising capacity is used up, a positive feedback. Methane may also help explain the rapid at the ends of ice ages (when sea-level rose ±100m). If there’s any really bad runaway warming scenario, it has to do with methane.
Nice article, many examples.
Except that it’s not just mountain communities that depend on glaciers - those are a key source of water for the main rivers during the dry season, especially at the western (Indus) end of the Himalayas.
Of course India could be better prepared, but the government needs to show this is a priority, rather than temples and Hindutva.
Maybe regional state governments could do better ?
The article is right to say that 1.5C is only a political goal not deduction from physical-science, a target which the Indian government did not, afaik, explicitly support, despite pressure from all the smaller neighbouring countries which clearly did. India always emphasised equity in the climate negotiations, but too much from a point of view of equitable access to global atmospheric space (i.e. right to burn coal too, proportional to population). So they got lumped together with China which has hugely higher emissions (also higher per-capita than europe), rather than with the most vulnerable countries (especially in Africa) which will receive most of the adaptation funding.
Maybe stupid provocations by US can galvanise climate cooperation by rest of the world. I remember COP6 in Den Haag - which failed due to miscommunication between US (end of Clinton admin) and EU (within which, FR and UK failed to understand each other). Six months later at COP6bis, with the US then led by Bush administration (after blocking recounts in Florida) and similarly pulling out of Kyoto protocol, the rest of the world united against US, the deal was done and the whole COP went for a celebration party cruise down the Rhine (yes the numbers were smaller then, but the boat did feel a bit ‘top-heavy’).
Now, compared to then, US controls much smaller chunk of total emissions and GDP, and the technology transition has momentum. The bigger questions are whether India will follow a similar coal+concrete pathway as China, and eventually how Africa will evolve.
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 agree that the chinese dams pose risks to India (although also some potential benefits if they could agree about management, but then look at what brotherly neighbour Russia did to Ukraine’s dam … ) - however it’s not obvious how building another dam downstream really helps - unless the volume retained is as great as for the chinese dam which seems unlikely since India doesn’t control the deepest part of the gorge, and they keep it half-empty just-in-case there’s a surprise release. So I reckon the unspoken logic is rather - since china broke the concept that it’s a wild river, we might as well exploit it too.
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?
There are renewables available cheaper than coal( if you take into account subsidies ), especially in China (the country that dominates those graphics (if you look carefully at the vertical scales). However, there are many political leaders - mainly of older generation - who cannot imagine abandoning coal, they prefer to keep on subsidising, to save traditions and communities, to defend their concept of what made ‘great’ decades ago. In China and India there is also a widespread concept that since the west did this in the past, so now they have to use up an equivalent per-capita share of the atmospheric space - a kind of collective global suicide.