Ben Matthews

I’d say there might be an ‘optimum’ somewhere in between - on average slightly lower rate than replacement, aiming for sustainable decline without crisis, preserving cultural heritage - as human cultural diversity matters as well as biodiversity. But we lack intelligent discussion of this topic - partly as it’s hard for people to imagine intuitively how small annual changes integrate over time.I’d like to further develop my interactive model - designed for climate projections but including a demographic model, to help people experiment for themselves, including regarding potential changes in global migration fluxes.

As a kid, I learned to write i = i +1, before school maths taught me it can’t. The point is, computers do iteration well, especially to model dynamics of real non-linear systems, while classical maths is good at finding algebraic solutions to equilibria - typically more theoretical than real. Calculus is great for understanding repeatable dynamics - such as waves in physics, also integrating over some distributions. But even without knowing that well you could still approximate stuff numerically with simple loops, test it, and if an inner-loop turns out to be time-critical or accuracy-critical (most are not), ask a mathematical colleague to rethink it - believe in iteration rather than perfect solutions.

Actually, if you swapped ‘on’ for ‘by’ (and cut ‘US diminishment’ etc.) you’d have a point there - Russian emissions per capita are among the world’s highest and growing, while they decline in the rest of the north - most commentators don’t notice as Russia has no NGOs left to shout about it.
(Note emissions fell since 1992 but from an even higher peak - while soviet industry produced that huge stockpile of missiles, tanks etc. now being used up). Also there are potentially huge climate feedbacks in Siberian forests and tundra, and we should be cooperating globally to help manage that. Maybe ‘europe from lisbon to vladivostok’ was a missed opportunity. I crossed siberia by train, helping local scientists attend COP3 in Japan, even studied many russian songs. Maybe one day we’ll cooperate again. But now I and many others here think the only way to end these wars, is for russians to dump their crazy leadership which started them.

I’m not an expert on biodiversity, although I’d like to be. Of course extinction is forever, and habitat loss is exacerbated by climate feedbacks. But we have to accept change, making less fuss about protecting ‘native species’ (to me this feels rather like nativism wrt human immigration), and recognise that life on earth has suffered and survived worse calamities in geological history, so it will re-adapt to new situations, if we let plants and animals (including ourselves) move with the climate. We can’t save all the old ecosystems (for example from considering thermodynamics of the symbiosis within coral reefs, I have little hope for their survival with combination of higher T and CO2 and SLR), but we might help create new opportunities for new ecosystems in new places. In this context, what matters is the rate of changes - as it takes time for trees to grow, soil to accumulate - rather than ‘equilibrium’ changes.
I don’t know whether the OP was specifically reacting to lack of progress at the Biodiv COP16 in Cali, as well as US election and climate news, but as an old hand at COPs too, I hadn’t expected much, at the end of these circuses the only certainty is that the show must always go on (or diplomatic teams would kill their own job). In my opinion both COP processes have got bogged down talking mainly about money, and the UN system as a whole has not been working for many years, so we need some radical rethinking about global cooperation. Nevertheless on a local and regional level plenty of positive things are still happening. Also human population growth is also peaking, or heading that way, on all continents except Africa, and in many countries there is reforestation recently.
In general, bear in mind that many big science consortiums publish reports around this time of year, with extra-worrying headlines, in a bid to influence the COP processes. This is just part of the new-normal seasonal cycle, like the grey skies where I live, but not a reason to lose hope - brighter days will follow.

Hey, I study curves of climate change for decades now, and can tell you there is hope.
The world probably just passed peak global emissions - mainly due to China, which counts for a lot more than USA, whose emissions were falling anyway - that trend may slow down but not stop - as renewables are cheaper now. China is manufacturing most renewable stuff now, but the science that drove the transition was led by europe and US, the work wasn’t wasted. Indeed, peak emissions is not peak concentration, and there’s a lot of inertia in the deep ocean and ice-caps, so temperatures will keep rising during my lifetime, but peak temperature, at least below 2ºC, is foreseeable now, we are succeeding to bend those curves.
That wasn’t the case when I lost hope, due to the gap between climate science and policy, back in late 1990s. But I’m still alive now, and glad of it, and would like to stay around longer to see how the future evolves, only wish I’d prepared better for later life, as it’s a long path, not easy but challenges can be inspiring, no simple answers but the complexity is beautiful. Keep going.

I’m aware of the racism issue, I even observed it myself in China, even many years ago.
But i’ve also seen similar problems in other corners of the world. Such cultural concepts can change slowly, as they did over here.
Anyway, I doubt this would dissuade people trying to connect what will become the world’s main supply of surplus young labour, with the world’s greatest demand for care-services, combined with spare apartments, money, and a milder climate. Not saying it’s good or bad, just trying to anticipate future changes.

Indeed that piece of evidence suggests it, but did CCP really want republicans in power? They are all authoritarians, but those can end up fighting each other, just starting with the trade war that has been promised.

I agree. For global discussions, are many Indians going to learn Chinese, Swahili, Hausa, Arabic, and vice-versa ? Meanwhile international-english is the new latin… Even within India, the south insists to keep english as an official language, to avoid being dominated by more populous hindi-speaking north.
Alternatively LLM-translation may facilitate multi-lingual discussion, but in this case the language of software development may still be influential during such transition.
By the way - this is an important topic for future of lemmy, which should expand more towards the south - where’s a good place to develop it (beyond such set of replies)?

article doesn’t consider the agenda of the owner of X and its algorithms

That seems like a big change in one year. It may to some extent reflect delay, as on average chinese used to pair-up at a younger age than typical in europe, also maybe some feel old traditions aren’t necessary to keep a stable family with children. But the article says, the core factors are economic. Even so, as they have built so many surplus apartments, the [real] prices must drop, I wonder how many years before they are trying to sell the chinese dream to migrants from Africa or elsewhere.

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.

Sure, China needs more ambitious medium-term climate targets, and this matters as its emissions are such a large fraction of the total, so their projections strongly influence global climate goals. But much changed recently - their capacity for renewables is huge, and road transport electrifies. Meanwhile China is heading downhill now - population is clearly declining, emissions probably are too (awaiting latest data), and maybe even economy depending on which statistics you believe, and whether there’s any soft-landing from the housing stall.
So the peaking target is probably no longer relevant, although they may still have trouble with their gdp intensity targets (due lower gdp than expected) - but there are various ways to re-interpret that.
It doesn’t surprise me that Tsinghua profs try to keep options open to nourish the dreams of the old men in power - just maybe their three-child policy will bear fruit, maybe people want even more highways and bridges to nowhere, or they can keep exporting such projects (including their steel) to africa, south asia etc.
China also occasional gets extra-cold blasts some winters, which may help to explain keeping coal power capacity as a backup, while also keeping regional coal tycoons on-side, but on average this capacity may not get used much.
So when comparing targets, and especially aggregating such targets across countries to project the climate outcome, it’s important to bear in mind that the gap between official ambition and reality - the probability of meeting emissions targets - differs a lot between countries, this partly reflects political systems - and China seems particularly ‘conservative’ in this regard …

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.