human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
VIEWED: 60750
PAGE 111 of 111
Wow... I'm just looking at other bullshit you've posted in this thread.
Man... I wish I cared enough to start going back through all of your posts here and just shove all of the bullshit that never happened right up your ass.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Europe’s Summer of Reckoning Is ‘Just the Beginning’
The continent is experiencing some of its biggest fires and highest temperatures ever. Residents are fleeing, leaders are struggling to respond and “it will get worse,” one climate expert said.
By Mark Landler and Chico Harlan | July 29, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/world/europe/summer-heat-wave-fires
-climate-change.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2VA.0R-X.wlgd__cj5u73&smid=tw-share
A dense, yellow-orange pall hung over Bordeaux on Sunday, blotting out the sun and blurring the spires of the cathedral in this French city. A swirl of tiny ash particles stung eyes and stuck in throats. Twenty miles west of town, a mammoth forest fire burned so ferociously that it generated its own weather system.
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was driven out of his home by the approaching flames. He could have been speaking for millions of people across Europe.
Ravenous fires. Searing heat waves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval — ruinous wars, deadly pandemics — it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.
It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
It has forced the cancellation of concerts and festivals, curtailed the final stage of the Tour de France cycling race and closed the Louvre Museum and Eiffel Tower early. It brought wildfires to the Scottish Highlands. It led organizers in London to call off a conference on how to cope with extreme heat. And it caused at least 10,000 heat-related deaths across Europe in June alone — a number that may turn out to be an undercount.
“Europe is ground zero when it comes to impacts” from climate change, said Johan Rockström, a Swedish scientist who is the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
“2026 is just the beginning,” Professor Rockström added. “It will inevitably get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I’m afraid, we’ll be passing the limits of adaptation.”
Europe is not alone, of course. Heat waves gripped Australia and Japan this year. Floods devastated Kenya and Angola. A snowstorm paralyzed the Eastern United States. Developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere are still more vulnerable than wealthy Europe to the effects of a changing climate.
Yet no other continent has warmed as rapidly as Europe, at nearly twice the global average since the mid-1990s. That has forced Europeans to confront, more starkly than others, the harsh realities of a changed climate, particularly in the summer, when their once-mild days have given way to furnacelike heat.
Though still cooler than other parts of the world, like the American Southwest or the Persian Gulf region, Europe is less able to cope because its buildings are often without air-conditioning and were built to retain heat. The homogeneity of the trees on its hillsides and coastal plains, many of which were planted during cooler, wetter periods, make them dangerously flammable during fire season.
“With this heat wave and these fires, you can say it starts to become unbearable,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a Swiss climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
Whether it leads to drastic new measures — either to mitigate the effects of a warmer climate or to adapt to them — is another question.
In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared a “climate emergency,” which he said would necessitate a state pact to “attack the root of the problem in a structural way.”
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Solar Has Crossed a Critical Economic Tipping Point
By Leon Stille - Aug 29, 2026, 4:00 PM CDT
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-Has-Crossed
-a-Critical-Economic-Tipping-Point.html
• Solar now requires no more upfront capital than coal or gas to produce the same annual electricity, reversing a disadvantage that was as large as five-to-one a decade ago.
• Batteries and wider grid flexibility still add real system costs, but firm solar-plus-storage is already competitive with new fossil generation in favorable markets.
• For capital-constrained emerging economies, solar no longer means paying more today to save money tomorrow. Increasingly, it is the cheaper entry ticket as well.
For years, the economic case for solar came with an awkward qualification. Yes, it had no fuel bill. Yes, its operating costs were low. And yes, over the life of a project it could already produce cheaper electricity than a new coal or gas plant. But first, someone had to pay for it.
Solar concentrated most of its lifetime costs at the beginning. Fossil power appeared to ask for less capital upfront and spread the rest of the bill across decades of coal or gas purchases. In rich countries with deep capital markets, that distinction could be managed. In emerging economies facing high interest rates, limited public budgets and competing infrastructure needs, it could determine what was built.
That disadvantage has now largely disappeared. According to a new Ember analysis, a solar plant can now require less upfront investment than a coal or gas plant for the same amount of electricity delivered. A decade ago, solar could require up to five times as much. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electric-fast-track-for-e
merging-markets/
This is not another claim that solar has become cheaper on a lifetime basis. That happened years ago. It is a more fundamental tipping point: solar is now competing with fossil fuels before the first tonne of coal or cubic meter of gas is purchased.
Fossil Power Has Lost Its Financing Shortcut
Comparisons between power technologies are often distorted by nameplate capacity. One megawatt of solar does not produce the same annual electricity as one megawatt of gas, because the sun does not shine continuously. Ember therefore compares the capital required to deliver the same quantity of electricity rather than simply matching the number printed on the generator.
That is the economically relevant comparison. In the past, solar needed considerably more installed capacity to produce the same annual output, while solar modules themselves were far more expensive. The resulting capital burden created a simple argument for fossil fuels: build the cheaper plant now and pay for fuel later.
Mass manufacturing has dismantled that argument. Solar PV's total installed cost has fallen by 87% since 2010, according to IRENA. Module production has become a vast, standardized industrial process. Efficiency has improved, supply chains have expanded and installation experience has accumulated across almost every major market.
Solar's capital profile has not changed, it still requires most expenditure upfront. The amount of capital required has.
That distinction is especially important in countries that import fossil fuels. A gas plant may look affordable on the day it is commissioned, but every megawatt-hour it generates creates another fuel purchase. Solar effectively prepays much of its energy supply for the next 25 to 30 years.
The old choice was between a capital-heavy clean asset and a cheaper fossil asset with recurring fuel costs. Increasingly, it is between two similarly priced assets, one of which arrives with a permanent fuel bill.
Much more at https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-Has-Crossed
-a-Critical-Economic-Tipping-Point.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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And Yet It Warms
A new edition of a manual that helps federal judges understand scientific subjects included a chapter on climate change that was withdrawn after attacks by denialists.
By Jed S. Rakoff | September 24, 2026 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/09/24/and-yet-it-warms-federal-j
udges-and-climate-change/
Most federal judges have little scientific knowledge or training. They therefore often approach with some trepidation the many cases pending before them involving science, ranging from patent disputes to pharmaceutical class action suits to litigation over artificial intelligence.
To help acquaint federal judges with the basics of such subjects, the research and educational arm of the federal judiciary, the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), began publishing the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence in 1994. It includes chapters on general topics such as the scientific method and others on more specific subjects that a judge may have to confront in a given case, such as epidemiology, toxicology, neuroscience, or computer science. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, in her foreword to the most recent edition, writes, “The manual is the product of close collaboration among highly respected scientists, engineers, judges, and lawyers. It delves into the scientific subjects that judges most often face. It explains scientific approaches and explores scientific uncertainties and limits.”
No judge is required to consult the manual in any given case. It is simply a tool that is available if the judge thinks it will be useful. And because it is publicly available in print and online, the lawyers in a case can consult it as well.
In preparing new editions of the manual, the FJC has partnered since 2010 with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a private institution established by Congress in 1863 to advise the government on scientific issues. That collaboration resulted in the widely praised Third Edition of the manual, published in 2011, and the FJC asked the National Academies to prepare a Fourth Edition, which was published at the end of 2025.
To fulfill this task, the National Academies utilized the same process that had worked so well in the preparation of the Third Edition. First, a thirteen-member committee was chosen to oversee the entire project, composed of nearly equal numbers of prominent scientists and experienced judges, all of whom had been identified and approved by the FJC and the National Academies. The co-chairs were the geneticist Fred H. Gage, known for his discovery of stem cells in the adult brain, and the senior federal judge Nancy D. Freudenthal. The other scientists were of equally high stature and accomplishment, and the other judges, a mix of liberals and conservatives, had all served with distinction for many years. Virtually all the members of the committee had prior involvement with educational projects concerning the interplay of science and the law.
The Fourth Edition committee, in collaboration with senior staff from the FJC and the National Academies who had worked on previous editions of the manual, selected authors for each of the twenty chapters. Some of these authors had participated in writing chapters for the Third Edition and others were new to the project, but all had established reputations for the rigor of their work and were carefully advised as to the purposes of the manual. They drafted the initial versions of their respective chapters, which were shared with the Fourth Edition committee for its review. Comments received from the committee members were shared with the authors, who undertook revisions to their chapters.
Once the Fourth Edition committee determined that the chapters had been sufficiently revised, they were submitted to panels of outside reviewers, some fifty in all, again including prominent scientists, judges, and others chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise. Depending on whether a chapter was an update of a chapter that had appeared in the Third Edition, was significantly m
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