In terms of thematic similarity, sure.

But in terms of magnitude of the impact, microplastics aren’t nearly as dangerous as lead, asbestos, or cigarettes. Those lead to huge quality of life downgrades, and take decades off of a life.

A society that replaces cigarettes with ubiquitous microplastics exposure will still improve the population’s health outcomes, by a lot.

If we can reduce that demand as we continue to build out renewables, we can decommission fossil fuel power generation at huge rates.

One point the author makes is that the data obscures a real phenomenon where switching from an inefficient fossil fuel source to an efficient renewable to do the exact same task actually already reduces the demand for energy.

For example, switching from a car that gets 30 miles per gallon to an electric that gets 3.3 miles per kWh, for a person who drives the American average of 12,000 miles per year, will switch from 400 gallons of gasoline to 3,636 kWh. The energy content of gasoline is 33.4 kWh/gallon, so that’s a drop in demand from 13,364 kWh to 3,636 kWh, a 72.8% drop in energy consumption while not changing any actual behavior.

Similar analysis can be done for replacing on-premise fossil fuel combustion with heat pumps for heating buildings and heating water and cooking food. Each of these ends up bringing off-grid fossil fuel use to on-grid electricity use, so that although there is demand destruction overall, that is still an increase in demand on the grid itself, so that looking at the grid stats alone obscures a huge shift.

And the feedback loop on these accelerating changes will make for interesting, somewhat unpredictable results, if the supply chain for gasoline and diesel starts feeling economic pinch in certain places, it may further accelerate adoption and actually close down certain routes for fossil fuel supplies.

With large scale battery projects being built at record pace, where more than half of the battery capacity on US grids was built in the last 2 years (maybe less), we can expect to see the economics of solar energy also push for accelerated adoption even in the face of regulatory resistance from the Trump administration.

Some military tanks are going hybrid, too, despite not really being able to move very far on the electric battery. It’s still worth it for idling and running the on-board systems without actually running the fossil-fuel-burning engine, though, and is potentially a stepping stone towards greater improvements in the electric drivetrain for quieter and more energy efficient movement.

And if not why are we even investing in this because those short hop flights frankly need to be eliminated for trains anyway.

Well, islands and other geographical features still exist in some places to provide geographical and geological barriers to train connections between certain city pairs.

If humans can hang glide I don’t see why we couldn’t use those aerodynamic principles to try to glide a car hooked up to glider wings. It’s a real engineering challenge, but I feel like it would be possible to get some distance in a scenario where a car uses its wheels to go fast, drives off a cliff, deploys some kind of glider wings (or drive with the glider wings timed out to where the car gets to the cliff edge right at the point where the wings plus updraft provide enough lift) to get the vehicle to glide a substantial distance.

Seems horribly dangerous but not impossible.

Does this have any noticeable effects for the physics on the surface, at either the high or low points?

Your initial critique was off base, arguing that discussion of what adaptation will look like is futile or useless, or a bad faith attempt to deflect from reduction of actual carbon emissions (to and beyond net zero). My response to that was simple, that you were wrong because adaptation often involves reduction of carbon emissions by reduction of energy consumption or other emitting activities, and that planning around those adaptive techniques is an important part of addressing the root cause as well (ecological destruction and carbon emissions).

You came in with a completely different critique, that nothing I said addressed the need to reduce carbon emissions in power generation. Not only was that a new idea not present in your first comment in this thread, but it’s simply wrong to say that my original comment didn’t address reduction of carbon emissions. I’m talking about reducing energy consumption, and reduction of energy use is tightly linked to reduction of carbon emissions. The mechanism is as I described it in my next comment: reducing demand for the highest polluting activities, including in places like the UK.

Your references to the economics of power generation supply and price may be accurate in the us but not in all countries. In the uk for example it would need political change to alter the way in which electricity is priced (everything is pegged to the price of gas supply) so renewables at the network level dont get to outcompete on price as you suggest.

The UK has a spot price market for electricity. Here’s a lot of data visualization around the grid of Great Britain, including information about spot prices, carbon emissions, demand statistics, and production statistics by time of day. You can see the actual daily curve in the solar production dramatically cutting in the fossil fuel usage. And yes, spot prices do go negative in the UK on sunny cool days (most recently in June 2026). And yes, in those moments, fossil fuel generation stops in those periods because it makes no sense to burn valuable fuel in order to produce negative-priced electricity. There’s a reason why UK’s fossil fuel consumption has dropped around 40% in the last 20 years.

That’s the mechanism by which increased efficiency in energy use reduces actual carbon emissions.

Your cynicism around whether we should be talking about adaptation isn’t productive, or even grounded in a strong grasp on the factual fundamentals. Planning and building infrastructure around our hotter future is important, and your dismissive attitude towards that hard work isn’t helpful. If you don’t want to do it, at least get out of the way of the people who will put in the work.

You just listed adaptations without any actual steps to reduce carbon emissions in power generation.

Then you’re not paying attention. If energy production contributes to carbon emissions (and it does), then reduction in energy consumption reduces carbon emissions. Moreover, reducing energy consumption allows the largest polluting sources to be phased out first, as there’s no longer as much of a need for those sources. Look at the daily power production by source in specific grids at different times of year. Plenty of US grids (and I’m sure other grids elsewhere) run fossil plants only at night during parts of the year where solar+wind+battery+nuclear+hydro are enough during the day. And those who work in green energy are doing everything they can to actually outcompete fossil sources on price and capacity. There’s not a government order to turn off the gas plants on sunny days, because it’s just economics that make fossil sources uncompetitive on price during those days.

The “net” in “net zero” means subtracting emissions from sequestration/capture/fixation (including large numbers for natural processes, like biological growth or rock weathering). If you reduce emissions, then that’s moving towards net zero. Maybe even overshooting to reverse some of past emissions.

And these are real efforts being made! Better passive cooling, greater deployment of heat pumps, better insulation, etc., are making new buildings much more energy efficient than old buildings, and adapting them to a reality of higher temperatures moving forward. Conserving and restoring coastal ecosystems is making coastal communities from the hazards of storms and flooding (made worse by climate change) while maintaining carbon sinks. All the examples I gave in my previous comment are actually being implemented in places, and should be expanded even more.

These are the conversations that are happening around adapting to climate change: mitigation of the effects in ways that also reduce carbon emissions.

Problem is that it seems like every time i hear ‘adapt to climate change’ it is almost immediately followed by a reduction in effort to achieve net zero.

I don’t think that’s a fair characterization around most of these discussions.

For indoor “climate” control, switching to more efficient heat pumps that can be reversible air conditioning, or improving insulation, or architecture/design that allows for better passive cooling or airflow, often has the dual effect of making the building more comfortable and reducing the energy requirements of keeping the building comfortable.

For adapting to water use and changes in precipitation patterns, the “adapt to climate change” positions are about using less water (and less energy), and wasting fewer resources in general.

Even the debates around moving people or industries or agriculture tend to center around adapting to resource scarcity, and tend to describe methods for reducing resource use at the places where they are scarce: ecological conservation at places where it floods, reducing human presence where natural disasters are more likely to occur, etc.

With mirrors, the maximum power is whatever sunlight hits the area of the mirror. Which for these satellites is 324 square meters. With solar irradiance at 1361 W/m^2 , that’s only 440 kW of energy, probably spread over a very large area, and not all of the spectrum useful for whatever you might want to use it for.

It’s an unbelievably stupid idea, but that also swings the other way in that it would be highly ineffective for any nefarious purpose, and will probably run out of money before it scales up to where each annoying satellite really does damage to visibility in the nigh sky or anything like that.

Just think about it in terms of the number of people and number of days per year where they need to raise the indoor temperature by a certain amount, compared to the number of people and days needing to lower the temperature.

If you’re looking at a place where it’s 95°F during the day and 85°F at night, and you like to set the temperature to 75°F, you’re only cooling it 10-20°F by time of day.

But if you’re looking at a place where it’s 35°F during the day and 15°F at night, and you want to heat things up to 65°F, you’ve gotta change the temperature by 30-50°F throughout the day.

Even when you’re comparing absurdly hot weather to absurdly cold weather, you’re still comparing something like 110°F to 0°F. You’re still looking at a 70°F swing versus a 35°F swing towards comfort.

Throw in the fact that combustion of fuels (fossil fuels like heating oil or natural gas, or other fuels like wood in a fireplace) is usually only about 1/3 or 1/4 as energy efficient than the equivalent temperature change by heat pump, and you can see how much more energy intensive the typical indoor heating setup is compared to the typical indoor cooling setup.

Some of it is obscured by the fact that fossil fuels are much cheaper per unit energy than electricity from the grid, so that heating bills aren’t as expensive in the same ratio, but in terms of actual energy used, it’s a big difference.

I don’t see how that could work. Water cooling is just so much more effective.

A 1 GW reactor operating at 35% thermal efficiency is dumping out 650 MW 2 GW of heat (Edit when I realized the nameplate capacity of a reactor is its electrical output, not its total power). It’s hard to see how you can put that heat somewhere in the ground at a continuous rate and maintain some kind of equilibrium.

Evaporative cooling can handle roughly 2400 joules/g of water evaporated, so 1 MW (1 MJ/s) of heat could translate into about 416 g of water evaporated each second. That’s what those cooling towers are doing in the stereotypical image of a nuclear power plant.

Meanwhile, if you’re allowed to dump the waste heat by discharging warmer water than you take in, water can take on 4.184 J / °C g, so 1 MW would raise the temperature of about 240 kg of water by °C per second.

That’s a lot of water used to cool these plants, but there’s really nothing that can compete with water at these scales. That’s why these plants are next to plentiful water, like on riverbanks next to rivers that have 100-10,000 cubic meters of water per second flowing by. Evaporate just 1 cubic meter (1,000 kg) of water per second for cooling 2.4 GW of heat.

Or, even without evaporative cooling, you could dump about 4 MJ of heat into each cubic meter of water that passes by and only raise it by a single 1°C.

So when the rivers are already running hot or with low water levels, there’s really nothing else a power plant could do to expel/reject all the heat it’s generating.

Yes, but this published finding is interesting because it reduces the steps.

Anyone can extract the elemental lithium from lithium cells, but it takes a lot of energy and harsh solvents and creates a lot of waste byproducts.

But extracting lithium iron phosphate (LFP) salts is much less energy intensive, if those salts can be reused. This paper shows that LFP can be extracted and then reused as an ingredient in creating LMFP, a cathode material with higher performance characteristics.

This is akin to using a technique to filter water instead of cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen and reconstituting the elements back as water.

Even in the U.S., we use a lot more energy heating homes than cooling homes. Around 43% of our total in-home energy usage is on heating, and about 8% is on cooling.

Heat waves don’t cause nearly as big of a strain on our grid as winter storms, because AC doesn’t consume as much energy as even our efficient heat pumps in the winter.

That’s because a heat pump that can lower the temperature by 10°-15°C is really all you need in the hottest part of the summer, whereas in the winter raising the temperature 25°C isn’t uncommon.

I was flabbergasted the first time I realized just how far north Europe is, compared to North America.

Paris is at 48° 51’ N, significantly further north than Toronto (43° N), Montreal (45° N). London is at 51°N 30’, which is further north than Vancouver (49° N), and just slightly further north than Calgary (51°N).

Even southern European cities like Ibiza (39° N) are at comparable latitudes to northern American cities like Philadelphia (40°N) or even New York (41°N).

If Europe starts seeing climate comparable to similar latitudes in North America, that would represent a huge change from the recorded history.

That’s not true. There is plenty of profit to be made with selling stuff that helps reduce energy use, selling energy that uses less fossil fuel (or produces less CO2), undercutting competition with more efficient methods, etc.

The tech world talks a big game about disruption and making billions or even trillions from it. You don’t think there are people who want to make trillions disrupting fossil energy companies?

Of course, since the greenhouse gases are still building up, it takes more and more ice each time.

Thus solving the problem once and for all.

They’re closed. The lid moves up and down to deal with changes in pressure as tanks are filled or emptied, without having to add air into the mix.

I like gas for certain types of cooking, especially those that involve actively flipping things in the pan. And even when I switch to induction some day, I’ll still have my outdoor pizza oven, charcoal/wood grill, and, if I’m not gonna have gas indoors, probably a gas wok burner.

For anything involving wet heat (boiling, blanching, braising, steaming), anything involving the oven, and even deep frying, I’m looking to switch eventually. But for now, I do enjoy cooking on gas.

I agree that buying fuel at those prices aren’t economically feasible. But, if we end up in a world where we have far more generation capacity than there is normal demand, that excess capacity might prove to be useful for energy-intensive chemical production, including making fuel.