In the Disasters and Policy Stagnation scenario, a series of natural hazards affects all European countries, starting with heatwaves, droughts and wildfires in 2026, followed by a combination of floods and storms in 2027. The compounding effects of these hazards could lead to a decline in euro area annual GDP of up to 4.7% by 2030.

It reads like self-parody. We need to remember that economics is a pseudo-science.

Perhaps you’d consider writing a paper to detail all this. And then submitting it for peer review, of course. I am not a climate scientist so I will content myself with trusting reliable secondary sources.

Point 2: “Reliable sources”. They are likely wrong. Read the paper.

Yeah, no. To be clear, the source I referred to is Our World in Data. It’s widely respected and I have better things to do than second-guess it.

And yet reliable sources say what seems to be generally accepted, namely that stopping carbons emissions completely in a short time frame (a couple of years) would land us with “1.5 degrees by the end of the century”. So, as I said, something is off with this “10 degrees”. Perhaps it’s the “end of the century” bit.

And yet, says the same article:

Equilibrium warming is not ‘committed’ warming; rapid phaseout of GHG emissions would prevent most equilibrium warming from occurring.

So something’s off.

In theory, no. There’s actually a tiny bit of runway left. If carbon emissions continued as today for about 2 or 3 years (extrapolate figures) and then stopped, the temperature would plateau at 1.5 and then very slowly fall.

Of course, the problem is that emissions are absolutely not going to stop in 2027.

BTW: current average projection is around +3.5 by century’s end. That’s actually a bit lower than it was a few years ago, due to faster than expected roll-out of green tech. But it’s obviously still way, way too high. Especially because of the risk of tipping points.

dog ownership dog ownership

This sure sounds like your bugbear! It’s because they eat lots of meat? What if (devil’s advocate) the dog were owned in replacement of a child?

It’s clear that Antarctic tourism is a completely unsustainable proposition. But I’m regularly surprised by how few people imagine that they personally are implicated when they take part in any given practice that is unsustainable at scale. It’s as if people see their actions as happening in a vacuum.

I once met an Antarctic tourist. I admit that I listened with interest to their breathless story of glass-clear water and whales you can touch and so on. But I also felt a bit of disgust too.

in places like France and Japan

This is completely wrong.

You talk exclusively about Japan, so even if your anecdata is representative, then my point is not “completely” wrong. Let’s begin by using language correctly.

Pretty convincing arguments. Thanx.

Tells you that you can take your social media back from big tech then casually recommends Bluesky. Gimme a break.

I generally agree but I still feel it’s important to keep some perspective. Bluesky is not the solution but it’s definitely progress compared to existing corporate platforms (because it has real fundamental differences - several articles posted here went into detail about this).

IMO the best argument against Bluesky is that it will suck up the oxygen for other, better, solutions. That’s a fair theory but it seems to me that there’s plenty of market share to go round right now. Everyone is still on the evil corporate platforms.

RSS still exists and it’s still beautiful.

Agree, I use it every day.

I’ll be honest, a quick review of this thread did not clearly reveal who was downvoting who for what. My position, and this other person’s, is that downvoting opinions is bad manners and toxic to healthy discussion. If there was genuinely harmful advice there, then OK, downvote away.

(Obviously these days the word “harmful” is thrown around liberally so this probably just puts us back to square one.)

Freedom of speech as an absolute

Of course it’s not absolute, where did I say otherwise? Straw man.

paradox of tolerance

This just feels like a fancy reference deployed to back up intolerance.

Exactly my point. The virtual equivalent of taping someone’s mouth shut because you happen not to agree with what they say.

Their original staff was a bunch of pretty serious journalists sourced from the BBC.

Similar to: chough

It’s a type of bird but good luck knowing how to pronounce it. Ahh, English.

deleted by creator

A few years ago I considered learning Greek. Abandoned the plan because Greek has the triple whammy:

• quite a hard language, with tricky grammar and different alphabet (phonetics easy tho)
• only spoken in one small country - not very useful (tho good for general culture - 6% of English lexicon comes from Greek)
• the locals all speak English (coz tourism) so you’ll have trouble getting a chance to progress

So: good luck.

Rigth - and downvotes fixes it? This is lunacy and detrimental to discussion/sharing.

Thank you. But anecdotally, it seems there are few of us who think this. I still don’t understand why.

Interesting anecdotes! There’s actually a bit of truth in the last one, I believe. Bodily fat is more evenly distributed in Inuits and even Europeans than it is in, say, west Africans.