perfunctory

> Above-average water temperatures led to a mass coral bleaching event over the austral summer of 2021/22, the fourth event since 2016 and the first recorded during a La Niña year.

I wonder how significant this is - coral bleaching during a La Niña year.

For myself I figured that there is absolutely nothing you can do for climate working as a software engineer. The best thing you can do is to become politically active. Go join some environmental movement you sympathize with the most. The next best thing you can do is make money at whatever job you can get and donate a significant amount to the aforementioned movement. I know this answer is not very popular among the techies, but I am afraid it's true.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

-- Blaise Pascal

I sincerely wish we collectively would spend more time doing nothing.

> Small area means less space to put large prisons on it - which means punishment moves to more corporeal and less incarceration

Did you just make it up?

Why do you think the EU will do it?

> We went from mass societal panic about Covid to mass societal panic about Ukraine basically without skipping a beat and few people notice how their energy was redirected so seamlessly.

Could it have to do with the fact that covid is the biggest pandemic in hundred years and that the UN Security Council had to call an emergency special session for the first time in 40 years because of Ukraine.

If these are not good reasons for "fear-porn", what do you think would be?

> while Kosovo has the cheapest energy prices in Europe due in part to more than 90% of the domestic energy production coming from burning the country’s rich reserves of lignite, a low-grade coal, and fuel bills being subsidised by the government.

> The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades.

> global bitcoin mining consumes 125.96 terawatt hours a year of electricity, putting its consumption above Norway (122.2 TWh), Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh).

The absurdity of the bitcoin mining in the middle of the climate crisis is mind boggling.

I love this development. Especially since as a bonus it might help solving climate change .

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/27/four-day...

fwiw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on_Cli...

They have. But it doesn't change the fact that the bailout helped them to maintain their market dominance which they now perpetuate by abusing the rules.

So this is how Lufthansa spends its covid bailout money. Nice.

Reading stories like this makes me very sad about the state of my profession. Something that is supposed to be a simple stupid logging library is on the front pages of the mainstream media due to all the havoc it's causing. We really have a long way to grow up as a profession.

> Fear not, we can pipe water in from other places

And then you find out that another country wants to pipe water from that exact same place.

Russell's essay has the answer:

> The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

Unfortunately there is no enough grassland to maintain the current levels of beef consumption. Most beef we consume is not grass-fed. So if you want to feed the world by converting grass into protein, that would mean just the same - radical reduction in meat consumption.

cop26 has barely ended as everyone happily forgot all the climate pledges.

For every resourced person motivated to capture co2 there will be another resourced person motivated to release it. Do we really want to find out who is gonna win the race. No matter how you spin it, we won't solve the emissions problem without politics.

> because you don't have to convince/force 7 billion people to do something.

Well, at least you'll have to convince them to pay $100 per tonne captured.

I always felt that trying to remove co2 out of the atmosphere without decarbonizing energy production is like trying to build a perpetuum mobile.

> Gas infrastructure is few underground barrels.

I am not sure if you are being serious.

> It’s absolutely unrealistic dream removing all petrol and diesel cars from the roads.

When I hear people say these sorts of things, I always imagine someone from the end of the 19th century complaining about removing horse carriages from the roads being totally unrealistic. You know, all this gas infrastructure has to be built and ...

I always felt that trying to remove co2 out of the atmosphere without decarbonizing energy production is like trying to build a perpetuum mobile.

While this looks pretty cool I can't help but think of this as yet another procrastination project. It seems we are prepared to do just about anything but the actual emissions elimination. We already know all we need to know about who the polluters are and what to do.

> The EIB, the world’s largest multilateral bank, which is active in 160 countries ...

It's not just Europe.

Thanks for your answer. I, for one, am not holding my breath. Not until the global emissions chart flattens at least.

> We could be billions more if we chose to live this way.

This line of reasoning is problematic as it just delays the stabilization. Maybe we could have a few billion more people now but surely there must be a limit somewhere. 10B, 50, 100? Sooner or later we'll have to stabilize.

> For some reasons, all the people I know who campaign for population stabilization/reduction are among those with the worst footprint.

To be clear, I personally believe we have to both stabilize the population AND dramatically reduce footprint per capita.

What is your hope based on? Genuinely curious. All evidence shows that there is neither momentum nor support, next to nothing is being done and global emissions just keep rising.

Wikipedia article has some background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSO_Safer

Warming is not the only negative effect of the excess GHG emissions. Ocean acidification for example is another one. Blocking the sunlight will not solve that.

> We've made massive progress on environmental issues

Care to elaborate? Afaic, global CO2 emissions keep going up year after year.