I didn't say I think they'll stop illegally fishing. If anything, this is so they can continue to illegally fish in other countries' waters. Can't illegally fish if there's no fish.

Right, it would be naïve to blindly assume China is going to do the right thing, but it's also cartoonish to assume China is completely ungenuine about their environmental goals.

I don't think their motives are pure and altruistic, but I think they are at least somewhat serious about environmental reform.

The Chinese government is untrustworthy and malevolent in a lot of ways, but they're not stupid. Their geopolitical dream is to become the world's biggest superpower and leading economy. They're looking ten, twenty, fifty years down the line, and they're conscious that for that dream to come true, there needs to be a world worth leading in.

Yes, I do. I think there's a few things at play.

For one, things are genuinely getting worse, and we're starting to see the real effects of climate change and pollution become more apparent, which is shocking a lot of people out of their complacency, flipping all the way to the other extreme. From "that's a problem for the future" to "OMG we're all dead".

People are also a bit frazzled and anxious coming out of the pandemic, and now looking at climate change, biodiversity loss, along with the warn in Ukraine, nuclear risk, the increase in worldwide authoritarianism, H5N1, etc. and it's a lot of crises to process at once.

The internet is also hurting people's ability to grasp nuance. It's critical that we understand there are many different possible levels of "bad outcome". Just because we cross the threshold into one bad scenario doesn't mean all is lost, there's no hope for the future, and there's no point striving to prevent things getting yet worse, or that we can't make things better in other ways.

If we don't celebrate the victories and keep striving, then all really is lost.

Exactly. Obviously it could be better, but I don't think people here are grasping just how HUGE a deal and what a big positive step this is. This is a 25x increase in the amount of protected ocean, countries currently at geopolitical loggerheads (China, and the EU/US/UK) have actually put aside their differences and actively teamed up on championing the deal, the agreement has been agreed with many nations in the Global South to apply it in a way that's fair to them, and environmental groups are extremely positive about it

We should be skeptical of it, yes, but kneejerk doomerism and negativity over any positive move is probably almost as toxic to attempts to protect the environment as big oil propaganda at this point. In fact, some of it IS big oil propaganda.

A third of the ocean protected doesn't mean two thirds destroyed. The opposite, it potentially helps the rest recover too.

China was one of the driving forces behind brokering this deal.

They may not give a fuck about other countries' sovereign waters, but they do care about their own interests. As a country that consumes vast amounts of fish, they're actually more exposed to loss of ocean biodiversity than a lot of other nations, and the CCP is aware of it. They can't send out factory ships to steal fish from other waters if there aren't any fish.

The agreement is (in part) about where fishing can be done, and they'll be hoping that the 30% of protected ocean (including protecting spawning sites or whatever) will be enough to feed the remainder with fish so they can carry on much as they have been outside those areas.

Also, don't assume that in the final implementation, China will be allowing any of those protected areas close to its waters.

It's the end of a four month long outbreak in humans. Not the total end of Ebola, unfortunately (which has been around much longer than a decade), as there are natural reservoirs of the disease in animals.

The concern with this recent outbreak was it would run out of control and spread more widely than the usual range for Ebola, as happened with monkeypox. The good news is, it has now been contained and that's not going to happen. But Ebola still exists as a pathogen in the wild, and can pose a threat again in future.

Reading the actual article, it looks like it might be waste gases from household rubbish, rather than the rubbish itself. So the methane and stuff that already seeps up out of landfills, capturing that and using it instead of letting it disperse straight into the atmosphere.

That's what it looks like anyway, it's not very clear. I'll try to find the source.

Edit: it's a mix of two things: capturing gases from a steelworks and processing non-recyclable waste into fuel. So yeah, not as green as it sounds, but better than normal jet fuel.

Yeah, he's one of the historical/legendary personas that blended together into the modern, Western concept of Santa Claus.

Other contributions include the English Father Christmas (originally a separate folk personification of Christmas/midwinter festivities, now melded into a synonym of Santa Claus) and possibly even Odin, who appeared in many ancient midwinter tales, connected to Wild Hunt legends, in which he soared through the night sky pulled by his eight-legged horse Sleipnir, as well as packs or herds of flying animals, and spirits or fey creatures (think: elves), and was known as a gift-bringer.

They're talking about different things and not mutually exclusive.

The other report was saying it's likely now too late to come in below the target of 1.5 degrees of warming by 2030, which means an acceleration of extreme weather is probably inevitable.

This is about the energy industry being on the brink of peaking it's CO2 output. Which, whether we experience severe climate effects or not, needs to happen. However bad it gets with intensive efforts to stop it, it would likely be much worse without.

Even with tipping points, it's not a binary switch of climate change happens / climate change doesn't happen. It has happened, it is happening, it will happen, and people and ecosystems will suffer for it.

To simplify, the levers we still hold are "how fast can we transition away from high-carbon emitting industry?", "how much additional carbon can we sequester?" and "can we/how much can we mitigate heating by other means?". They will determine whether it it be civilisation-damagingly bad (i.e. after a lot of adversity we reach some kind of manageable equilibrium in future decades with a society that is at least recognisable), or civilisation-endingly bad (i.e. it doesn't correct until centuries after it's forcibly reduced us to a stone-age sized population).

This report speaks to the first of those three levers, and puts something on the side of the scales that says we might have at least a fighting chance of reaching that manageable equilibrium.

I expect the International Energy Agency is factoring in a very broad range of factors in this, materials cost being a no-brainer in that.

And one big factor in rising material costs is sharply rising worldwide demand...

It's actually a small asteroid orbiting another, bigger asteroid. So, it's an asteroid "moon", basically.

The test moved the smaller one into a slightly closer, faster orbit around its own parent body, which continues on pretty much the same orbit through the solar system as before.

If I remember correctly, the stripping of the atmosphere by solar wind is a very gradual process, such that if we did have the technology to terraform it on the timescale of human history (even a process requiring centuries to complete) the rate of human-effected change would far outpace the rate of loss. So a terraformed Mars would still be habitable for a long time, even if we didn't solve the magnetism issue.

Like, if you could magically give Mars a full Earth-like atmosphere today, it would still be breathable thousands of years from now (assuming solar wind was the only deleterious effect).