Ben Matthews

  • New here on lemmy, will add more info later …
  • Also on mdon: @[email protected]
  • Try my interactive climate / futures model: SWIM
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  • 17 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Can see reasons why this compromise makes sense:

    • Flying so many participants to Adelaide would result in much greater CO2 emissions, while Türkiye is much closer to the centre of gravity of global population.
    • The Australian team has support of a better scientific capacity (like CSIRO), motivation from the network of small islands, and the language helps run such negotiations (although a pity it’s like that).
    • Both countries have a high vulnerability to climate change impacts - drought.
    • But the Australians don’t want too much scrutiny of their high per-capita emissions and coal exports.
    • While Türkiye is not a fossil-fuel exporter (unlike previous 3 COP hosts in middle east), and has a relatively large young population, so the ‘enthusiasm’ generated by hosting the COP may help build long-term capacity lacking in that region.

    However, pity Türkiye choose Antalya, a haven for russian oligarch sunbathers, and doesn’t even have a railway.
    And, zooming out, pity the system of UN regions, and in general the system of COPs is so crazy.




  • Seems to me a win-win scenario. Remember that Ukraine is actually remarkably good at railways - especially at manufacturing large numbers of comfortable and good-value sleeper wagons, which the rest of europe lacks, and also at maintaining their system in such adverse circumstances - their punctuality today is still much better than DB. On the other hand the track routes in Ukraine are anything but direct, dating from 19th century when capital cities were Petersburg and Vienna (so they align better N-S than E-W), so there’s a lot of potential to make them straighter. The obstacles maybe rather regional mistrust - whether politicians in Suceava accept the status of Chernivtsi - a similar question as whether hungarians / slovakians accept Uzhhorod, polish Lutsk or Kovel,…? Better passenger transport links could help to build trust.








  • I built personal webpages in the 1990s, and still do it now, I included javascript then, and still do now - to make calculations, show interactive graphics, quantitative stuff about climate change - see for example this model.
    I get your concept, that more websites should be written and hosted by individuals not big tech - but javascript is not the essence of the problem - js is just calculating stuff client-side for efficiency. In theory big tech could still serve up personalised algorithm-driven feeds and targeted advertising, just with server-side page generation (like php) and a few cookies, would waste more bandwidth but no stress to them. Whereas disabling client side calculations would kill what i do, as I can’t as an individual afford to host big calculations on cloud servers (which is also technically harder).