Ben Matthews

  • New here on lemmy, will add more info later …
  • Also on mdon: @benjhm@scicomm.xyz
  • Try my interactive climate / futures model: SWIM
  • 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Regarding the map - an annual average cost is not so meaningful - in higher latitudes solar is not enough in winter - especially where it’s mostly cloudy during the first half of winter. Wind helps the balance but not everywhere, always. Of course, the sophisticated models behind the article know all that, the issue is simplistic presentation. I note “we assume hydrogen is used for seasonal storage” - this may be rather optimistic - how many dark months can that cover?





  • I don’t buy this. I’m still using SMTP on my own domain and it’s working fine, a bit of spam but not unmanageable, real messages get read. Main challenge is digesting so many potentially-interesting list messages, indicating email’s continued dominance for professional topics. Seems this author has another agenda.
    Having said that, it’s a pity the world never agreed a protocol for micro-payment for emails (and for many other services), which would resolve the spam problem, and not be a burden for honest users.







  • Well such timescale would in any case depend on EU, not on convenience for any british parliament. There are now N. Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, [ Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo ?], Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, [Turkey ?] all in the queue to join EU. On the other hand, it might help from point of view of geographic and economic balance, otherwise the centre of ‘gravity’ will shift even further SE away from Brussels. I think to expand EU has to reform processes, to end all vetos and generalise multi-speed / opt-outs.
    Meanwhile a new british government could implement obviously convenient win-win cooperation step by step, until there isn’t so much left to change. And I’d be happy to see Scotland and Northern Ireland take a lead.


  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyztoEurope@feddit.deParty summaries
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    3 months ago

    I’d like to be able to vote for pan-european parties, but voting for Volt only works in very large constituencies (such as Germany). In most other places it likely reduces the chance of getting pro-european MEPs who might consider implementing such an option. What other strategies can help ?



  • Nice graphic. Although probably you’d see more info with just a lineplot, separating north / south + land /ocean. What strikes me is how regular the gap is over the last year, and how it bulges most in July-December, which suggests the ocean (larger and less variable) dominates the numbers, with El Niño overlaid on steady warming trend. To get it back down quickly, we need more effort on short lived gases - mainly methane (tackling aviation-indeed cirrus might also help compensate for reduced ship-sulphate cooling ) .