Per the linked article, the problem is misdiagnosed. Forestry research shows that a) patches of tree stumps emit on the order of 10 tons of CO2 per acre, and b) these emissions go away when loggers thin forests instead of clearing them. Why are we not hearing about such huge yet trivially avoidable emissions? They are an order of magnitude larger than fossil fuels.
There are plenty of good reasons to not like fossil fuels, mind you. But the carbon hockey stick is not one of them.
For the longest of times I thought the same way. Realizing that the actual issue was almost entirely tied to topsoil loss is what made me change my mind.
If you look into the atmospheric carbon dioxide data, you'll observe seasonal up and downs with the low point that takes us back to around where the high point from about a decade earlier. This means that we could resolve the issue very quickly in a scenario where farms keep enough plants around to soak up the soil emissions during tilling and harvesting operations.
Alley cropping is just one option to do so, btw. As I explain in a separate article [1], any well designed intercropping scenario should do the trick. The point is to not have a wide open field with no plants that could keep the fungi alive, block the wind to keep the carbon dioxide around, and soak up the carbon dioxide.
It can't be perfect because of night emissions and because trees eventually lose their leaves in the fall, but we can do far better than what we're currently doing.
TL;DR for those who don't click links: Corporate green solutions are shams. Promote gardening if you care about fossil fuels. An accounting chicanery keeps natural emissions out of view. The hockey stick is actually about canopy loss. Switching to alley cropping would reverse it. Promote food sovereignty if you care about ending oppression. Share this if you’d like to do your bit. Also, we need some help: can you offer work, support, or a retweet [1]?
This is a TL;DR version for readers who only read discussions. The link is a summary of my short book, which you can read online at the same address.
What the book does is expose an accounting chicanery that underpins the fossil fuel narrative for climate change. In a nutshell, the carbon accounting framework separates land-based emissions from other emissions like fossil fuel, and builds on the idea that you can't do much about the former. This is actually false, as evidenced by forestry research, and it provides cover for land theft and ecofascism in developing countries. The book goes on to provide a soil-based explanation for the carbon hockey stick and its global desertification ramifications. Lastly, it puts bottom-up solutions in front of the problem that communities can implement now without depending on governments.
> Can someone help me understand why the broader stock market is actually up compared to six months ago despite all these dire numbers being thrown around? Heck, Boeing stock is up today!
Dumb money is pouring in, and institutional investors are riding the dead cat bounce.
For Boeing specifically, it's because they fired thousands of workers to cut their costs. And to their credit, they're actually expecting a long slump. Many businesses are still deluding themselves.
> I kind of assume the virus grows exponentially inside the body and would dwarf the initial constant.
That assumes your immune system wouldn't kick in during the asymptomatic phase or a time close to exiting the latter. But your immune system would actually kick in as soon as it detects the infection, which would plausibly be much earlier. That would effectively buying you time to figure out which antibodies to produce before things become out of control.
> Actually the doses given for COVID are often higher.
Not just higher. The original article (the one out of China) that mentioned that there might be some positive effects reportedly suggested using doses that were a whopping 5 times higher than the usually prescribed amounts: 500mg/day vs the usual 100mg/day.
What more, the same article put forward that the drug was considered generally safe and without any potentially troublesome side effects. That raised more than a few eyebrows amongst the medical staff who knew the drug.
Sure, but for how long will it remain sustainable? The lockdown hasn't lasted a month in Italy and they're already seeing early signs of food theft that could potentially degenerate into food riots. I'm struggling to imagine how any country will make it sustainable for more than a month or two. Yet on paper, a prerequisite for stopping the lockdown seems to be that you've been testing on a fairly large scale, which only Korea seems to have pulled off.
The situation in France, for instance, is unenviable at the moment and absolutely not sustainable: albeit to a lesser degree as in the US, there's not enough PPE for essential staff, not enough masks for everyone else, and most crucially not enough tests to go about. Yet there's a full lockdown with fines and all, and insofar as I'm aware there isn't enough financial help for employers or employees or the self-employed or anyone else. It's only a matter of time before everyone realizes that they're going into this like it's 1914, expecting it'll all be over by the autumn.
It won't.
It won't, because of asymptomatic cases and because the virus is spreading in developing countries. Rich countries won't want to shell out the trillions that might be needed so the latter can cope with the situation. (And that will translate into yet another migration crisis to boot. Etc. Etc.)
For better or worse, the current lockdown measures in a growing number of countries are only postponing the inevitable mass outbreak by a few weeks. That is, unless countries get their act together and find a huge pot of money to tap into -- and in periods with a collapsing economy, the only sane pot of money to tap into is wealth. I'm not holding my breath.
As the saying goes, you can depend on Americans to do the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility. (Not by Churchill [1].) Plus, it's not a given that it is the right thing to do, especially if there's no plan for what comes after; and there reportedly are early signs of social unrest on this side of the pond [2]. A shutdown can't last until there's a vaccine. At best it buys you time.
It seems macOS could use virtualization or permissions to run these scripts in some throw away environment to get rid of the problem altogether. Preflight check programs shouldn't be able to write anything to disk.
J'invite (...) toutes les entreprises qui ont accès aujourd'hui au chômage partiel, c'est-à-dire qui ont leurs salariés payés par l'Etat, à faire preuve de la plus grande modération en matière de versement de dividendes"
> He is adamant that we are at the very bottom of the beginning of the curve
Sounds about right. The US is heading for a rough ride, which is made worse by a combination of lack of universal health care and sane coverage being tied to having an employer (or lack thereof of late). To say nothing of leadership (or, there too, lack thereof of late).
That said, the real stories will be sub-Saharan Africa and other poor countries IMO, plus Brazil and India in all likelihood. I'm struggling to imagine Western countries doing the right thing and extending a couple of trillion dollars to poor countries before it completely gets out of hands over there, even though it would be the right thing to do. Short of that, there will be new waves, over and over, until we've a vaccine.
If someone accepts your -$10 bid the house will totally be worth that by definition. Remember the $1 houses from Detroit a decade ago. They weren't even worth $1 due to the tax liability that came with them, and they didn't sell for that reason.
There are plenty of good reasons to not like fossil fuels, mind you. But the carbon hockey stick is not one of them.