The Ugandan military playing security guards for a China-controlled oil project… I think explaining human rights over there will have to start from zero - and may have to be backed with “or else” statements - if there exists an institution in a suitable position to issue them. :o
1 C more temperature -> air can hold 7% more water vapour
…but the peaks of fringe events are quite a bit taller than +1 C. Raising the average by 1 C raises the peaks considerably more.
Summary:
But then, in the geologically abrupt space of only a few decades, this great river of ice all but halted. In the two centuries since, it has moved less than 35 feet a year. According to the leading theory, the layer of water underneath it thinned, perhaps by draining into the underside of another glacier. Having lost its lubrication, the glacier slowed down and sank toward the bedrock below.
/…/
“The beauty of this idea is that you can start small,” Tulaczyk told me. “You can pick a puny glacier somewhere that doesn’t matter to global sea level.” This summer, Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, will travel to the Juneau Icefield in Alaska to look for a small slab of ice that could be used in a pilot test. If it stops moving, Tulaczyk told me he wants to try to secure permission from Greenland’s Inuit political leaders to drain a larger glacier; he has his eye on one at the country’s northeastern edge, which discharges five gigatons of ice into the Arctic Ocean every year. Only if that worked would he move on to pilots in Antarctica.
It’s not wild at all. :) The plan makes sense from a physical perspective, but should not be implemented lightly because:
Interestingly, warfare also has the effect of:
causing houses to be abandoned, necessitating houses elsewhere while the abandoned ones likely get bombed
decreasing the number of future consumers, whose future footprint would depend on future behaviour patterns (hard to predict)
changing future land use patterns, either due to unexploded ordnance or straight out chemical contamination (there are places in France that are still off limits to economic activity, because World War I contaminated the soil with toxic chemicals), here in Estonia there are still forests from which you don’t want trees in your sawmill because they contain shrapnel and bullets from World War II
I have the feeling that calculating the climate impact of actual war is a difficult job.
But they could calculate the tonnage of spent fuel and energy, that would be easier.
Well, a heat wave cannot last forever. And in terms of cold storage - it’s +30 C over here currently already for a week, it has been 1.5 months since the last snowfall - and the last pile of snow on the local airport is still melting. Darkened, not recognizable as the substance it used to be, but existing, without people making the slightest effort to protect it. :)
what the hell are we going to do?
In the very long term, stop climate change.
In the long term - dig in and design heat shelters, most likely. Because it’s cooler underground and heat waves will pass. When a bad one comes, people would stop working and find shelter from it. One can even accumulate cold in a thermal store during cool periods and distribute the cooling effect to premises during heat waves.
In the short term - those who can (there will be an equality and access problem) and those who must (who cannot stop working) would install air conditioners and similar stuff.
I don’t even want to imagine 50 C. In sauna, it’s is dry and you manage 30 minutes by sweating. But living in a sauna sounds bloody awful.
Also, almost anyone with a med / bio background will say - emergency rooms will be full at 50 C, and morgues will be crowded a few days after the event. :(
True, but toppling over can leave them intact. One of my foolish neigbours didn’t anchor his panel carriers properly and thought a thick fir hedge would protect them enough. A storm from unexpected direction threw four panel carriers (9 panels each) face down and severed the cables, so everything had to be disconnected and there was a safety risk (but not during night). I helped with the recovery work and not a single panel was broken.
…and that is why I no longer mount any solar panels horizontally. Not a chance in hell of withstanding that, and one of such storms hit within 150 kilometers last year. Within 30 years, I bet I’ll experience this effect.
Meanwhile, vertical panels can be up-armored (e.g. wooden beam running on top) to withstand such events.
It sure is possible.
A typical “obscenely bright” LED chip might be Cree XML, but many similar chips exist. You’d need a plano-convex or equivalent Fresnel lens - shorter focal lengths favour compact design. Then you need a driver. Some are fixed while some adjustable with a tiny potentiometer. You’d need an 18650 cell holder (it can be made too, an 18650 will go into a leftover piece of 20 mm electrical cabling pipe with a spring-loaded metal cap engineered of something).
Myself, I bought a nice head lamp, but it broke after one year. The driver board failed. Being of the lazy variety, I replaced the board with a resistor to limit current and now it’s been working 3 years already. Not at peak luminosity, the resistor wasn’t optimal of course. :)
I think the EU Commission has done a fairly good job of listing the pros and contras of small modular reactors:
They have some advantages over conventional (large) reactors in the following areas:
Explanation: even a shut down NPP needs cooling, but bigger ones need non-trivial amounts of energy, for example the 5700 MW plant in Zaporizhya in the middle of a war zone needs about 50 MW of power just to safely stay offline, which is why people have been fairly concerned about it. For comparison, a 300 MW micro-reactor brought to its lowest possible power level might be safe without external energy, or a minimal amount of external energy (which could be supplied by an off-the-shelf diesel generator available to every rescue department).
The overview of the Commission mentions:
SMRs have passive (inherent) safety systems, with a simpler design, a reactor core with lower core power and larger fractions of coolant. These altogether increase significantly the time allowed for operators to react in case of incidents or accidents.
I don’t think they will offer economical advantages over renewable power. Some amont of SMRs might however be called for to have a long-term steerable component in the power grid.
Wow, that’s a nice one. :)
Also, both of your links to solar-powered tool projects were educational. I knew this could be done, but I had never read about peope doing that. :)
I noticed a journalist mention (hopefully based on good sources) that this months’s storm was estimated to be 4-5 times weaker than the 1859 storm.
NASA, in their article mentions the recent storm as a G5 level geomagnetic storm caused by an X8.7 level solar flare.
X is the strongest class of solar flares and G is the strongest class of geomagnetic storms, but this was definitely not a record - an X20 flare has been observed once, but as I understand, the ejected particles didn’t hit Earth.
Where I live (latitude 59), a short electrical grid event occurred during the display of auroras. Something tripped and something immediately switched over to replace it, most people didn’t notice anything, but some had to restart various heat pumps and similar devices. Then again, in Europe, the power grid has relatively short lines and many transformers between them, which makes it comparatively less vulnerable.
Regarding transformers: it’s easier to let a power grid trip offline (and transformers are designed to behave so instead of being overpowered) rather than to keep operating despite a Carrington level solar storm and suffer failure on all longer east-west connections.
Also, I don’t think they used capacitors to protect their high voltage lines back in 1921, because the article Overvoltage Protection of Series Capacitor Banks notes:
“Their first application dates back to 1928 when GE installed such a bank – rated 1.2 MVar – at the Ballston Spa Substation on the 33 kV grid of New York Power and Light. Since then, series capacitor banks have been installed on systems across the globe.”
Also, failure on north-south connections isn’t nearly as likely, so a considerable part of the transformer “population” would be spared from impact.
Thus, while a single strong solar storm within the limit charted out in 1859 would be an extreme inconvenience and strong economic setback, it seems unlikely to end civilization.
A long period of severe solar storms could also result in ozone depletion in the atmosphere and become another extreme inconvenience - through increased UV exposure. However, most forms of life have seen such things in their evolutionary past, and humans have the ability to wear glasses, clothes and apply sun screen.
The author does not seem to have read Azarov or at least his references to sources leave this impression. If he was doing his research right now, I would recommend him to browse one book for hints about how the RIAU called themselves, and for additional sources of literature. But in general, I think he has the right conclusion. :)
Kontrrazvedka: The story of the Makhnovist intelligence service - Vyacheslav Azarov
The PDF sadly isn’t searchable (it’s image, so it’s a black hole for most search engines).
My understanding: they called themselves the “Insurgent Army”, sometimes the “Insurgent Division” and did not declare a state or claim a territory. When they were popular and widespread, they were more formally known as the “Revolutionary People’s Army of Ukraine” and “Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine” (kontrrazvedka was the counterintelligence branch which did dirty deeds like assassinations, espionage, counter-espionage, sabotage, expropriation / grand theft, etc)
A related story:
The first known anarchist state, and perhaps the only one, was to my understanding a republic declared by rebelling sailors and fortress-builders of the Russian fleet on the tiny North Estonian island of Naissaar (Nargen). (source) The “state” was laughably tiny and the population too - but the name was backed by possession of two battleships (Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk), with the ironic twist that the crew far outnumbered island dwellers. The only body to ever recognize the “state” was the Soviet of Tallinn, which existed during a double rule (togehter with the prototype Republic of Estonia) in the power vacuum between the Czarist retreat and the advance of imperial German troops. Evacuating before the German advance, the battleships sailed first to Finland and then Kronstadt, and the anarchists of the short-lived republic became core organizers among the sailors who later rose up in the Kronstadt Rebellion.
“The City is evaluating the chemical compounds in the spray to determine if they are a hazard either inhaled in aerosol form by humans and animals, or landing on the ground or in the bay.”
If it comes from the bay, I think it’s safe to assume it can go into the bay. :)
As for the rest, I think it’s OK for them to evaluate - and they are likely to reach the concusion that spraying seawater into the air is what the sea does on its own, and humans are pretty well adapted to reasonable amounts, so the instruction will be:
There’s a pretty high chance that when it does come together, it will be presented somehow on c/offgrid on this very server. :)
I generally agree with CrimethInc articles so extensively that I I find it hard to pick at something in them.
This time, however, I find the claim…
Palestinian liberation will only come about as the result of a full-scale political crisis in the United States
…but I don’t find the evidence.
Firstly, Israel is not wholly dependent on US weapons, and according to most measures, it has already secured a military victory - at such cost in civilian lives that it’s a diplomatic defeat - everyone who can count the casualties and destruction knows that Israeli politicians gave zero fucks, alienated many supporters (they had great international support when Hamas attacked them) and very likely will receive an invitation to the ICC (hopefully along with Hamas leaders, so they can be tried together - reality may differ as both will try to avoid the court).
Also, if the claim were true, and a full-scale political crisis in the US was required for Palestinian liberation, then sadly, assuming a full political crisis incapacitates the government to some degree - there would be considerable risk that Palestinian liberation and Ukrainian independece sit on opposite plates of the scale. Myself, I don’t like the concept that one group’s liberation and another group’s freedom can be contradictory. However, it seems undeniable that the US war machine is currently supplying weapons for two main causes, one of them reasonably ethical (defending Ukraine) and the other not (bombing Gaza into a previous epoch of history).
Regarding what the US government actually does… I don’t read every article and post about diplomacy (so I could be missing a lot) but it appears to me that the US government is at the moment actively dissuading Israel from going into Rafah (the remaining comparatively less damaged settlement) - both by talk and refusal to send heavy air-dropped bombs.
This could be due to international pressure (the US has Arab allies and has to present some facade to them), could be due to protests (Biden surely worries about approaching elections). It could even work - but might not, because Israel has other sources of weapons and might empty its stockpiles of some categories to make the final push. :( Still, as a long-time and reliable donor, the US government has much leverage on Israel. Especially as it recently helped mitigate the Iranian missile and drone attack, downing Iranian munitions above Jordan and Iraq and perhaps elsewhere before they reached Israel. Biden can - overly simplified - send a message of “we assisted and protected you, we have your best interest in mind, and it’s in your best interest to stop now”. Netanyahu might listen or ignore the message.
In the end, however, a word of caution - whatever happens, whatever the US does - if Hamas returns to power, that will not be Palestinian liberation, because the Hamas guys weren’t liberating anyone. In fact, they were beating, imprisoning and killing some of their Palestinian political competitors for the old-fashioned goal of staying in power.
I literally cannot find the word “Hamas” in the article at all. It speaks of everyone except those who started the curent war. That’s a massive oversight - oversight to the point of blinding oneself to a serious setback right around the corner. I’m not happy to see some of my comrades blinding themselves.
If one seeks a path to liberation, it has to include some recipe of not letting Hamas recover and return to power. And somehow getting lunatics out of Israeli government. The US has a role to play, and it may even be a decisive role, but as long as one side has rulers who prefer shooting civilians, and the other side has rulers who prefer to obliterate urban centers with bombardment… local political leadership must change, and no liberation will come unless it changes.
Well, there’s a DIY electric car which needs both axles to be re-designed. They didn’t pass driving tests in the field. Design is complete but welding cannot start before weather turns nicer.
Also, my house needs a battery shed on wheels - wheels to keep away construction bureaucrats, shed because it’s uncomfortable to sleep under the same roof with a very considerable amount of lithium cells. I’d like to keep some distance from them so that if something goes wrong, it’s would be just the cells. :) The bottom platform with wheels is complete, walls and roof and everything such - nope, not a trace, not even a good drawing. :)
Nice and thorough overview. :)