perestroika

“The City is evaluating the chemical compounds in the spray to determine if they are a hazard either inhaled in aerosol form by humans and animals, or landing on the ground or in the bay.”

If it comes from the bay, I think it's safe to assume it can go into the bay. :)

As for the rest, I think it's OK for them to evaluate - and they are likely to reach the concusion that spraying seawater into the air is what the sea does on its own, and humans are pretty well adapted to reasonable amounts, so the instruction will be:

• "spray it from the leeward side, it's polite that way"
• "don't put your face in front of the working sprayer"
• "don't use the sprayer during algal blooms"

It might interest people that the soon-to-be previous biggest thermal energy store is also located in Finland, under the island of Mustikkamaa in the capital city of Helsinki. The city heating company Helsingin Energia "charges" the store by pumping heat out of sewage in summer. I think it was about 10 gigawatt-hours and it's not pressurized, so water can only reach 90 C over there.

(A side note: if you allow water at 140 C to boil in a controlled manner, you get steam, which can also produce electrical power, although probably in a suboptimal manner.)

Finnish bedrock seems more suitable than average rock for such ventures (which I would call "artificial geothermal energy") - granite is a poor thermal conductor and a reliable rock for making caverns.

I hope it goes well. :)

Copying out the noteworthy bits.

Claim:

the UAE’s National Center for Meteorology told CNBC it had not seeded any clouds before the storm struck on Tuesday

Verifiable with a bit of FlightRadar searching:

seeding operations tend to take place in the east of the country, far from more populated areas like Dubai. This is largely because of restrictions on air traffic, and means it was unlikely that any seeding particles were still active by the time the storms reached Dubai.

Verifiable with a weather map:

perhaps the best evidence that cloud seeding wasn’t involved in these floods is the fact that it rained all over the region. Oman didn’t do any cloud seeding, but it was even more badly affected by flooding, with a number of casualties.

Now, if I was running a cloud seeding programme and saw a mega-rainstorm coming, I would quickly consult with a person who knows about drainage and call off the flight, saying "we've got enough coming". It doesn't take superintelligence to make that decision, just a functioning meteorological office and a bit of sense.

...and the final conclusion:

Dubai is comically ill-equipped to deal with rainfall

(because they typically don't get any)

Coincidentally, there's a cheaper way too. :)

The ratings of existing power lines can be recalculated on an hourly basis according to outdoor temperature and wind.

That however, requires software and agility, which big companies seldom have... and it doesn't help during a heat wave with no wind, of course.

Poleward winds, which previously made few inroads into the atmosphere above Antarctica, are now carrying more and more warm, moist air from lower latitudes – including Australia – deep into the continent, say scientists, and these have been blamed for the dramatic polar “heatwave” that hit Concordia. Exactly why these currents are now able to plunge so deep into the continent’s air space is not yet clear, however.

Even if they cannot explain the "how", it seems beyond doubt that the process can happen repeatedly.

When it happens repeatedly, one should plan for faster Antarcic ice loss, since the excess heat of the rest of the planet can now increasingly reach and melt glaciers.

That has implications for coastal regions everywhere on the planet. Don't build on the coast. Make plans for higher storm surges and sea level rise. And - needless to say - don't add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

That was some interesting reading, thank you. :)

About the Little Ice Age - I feel like the article slightly mis-dates the period, placing it earlier than many sources suggest.

As a side note, human-amplified mechanisms have been proposed to the Little Ice Age, aside from natural ones - from the conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors, to the Black Death, to the smallpox epidemic that Europeans brought into Americas... but the likely trigger, I think, was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1257_Samalas_eruption

As for human societies taking different turns when facing difficulty - I would search for the cause in their world views, technologies and interactions. Europe had already put itself on a course to technical sophistication - techniques such as writing, number systems and methods of calculation enable a single ruler to boss around more people, and ever since the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Chinese invented their versions, they had big bosses claiming divine mandate or origin.

Everywhere in Eurasia, people also rode and transported cargo - horses, camels and elephants were used to transport goods and fight wars. Their existence enabled the use of wagons and carts, which enabled winches and cranes, siege engines, windmills, sawmills and watermills, to the point of having technology to equip armies and fleets...

...and indeed, armies and fleets were a common problem everywhere in Eurasia. Some where Christian, some Islamic, some believed their own flavour of stories, but the elite having access to writing (without the common people having the same) enabled spread of ideology and top-down management.

Genghis Khan added a key component - an efficient postal system. This enabled remote control of and fast-moving armies, allowing to manage supply chains, give strategic input to distant generals and subsequently - conquer pretty much the known world.

He was not unique, though - Arab armies did a similar trick earlier, Europeans repeated the nasty trick later, enabled by technology from China (gunpowder, printing and compass)... the Ottoman empire grew between the two and took a bite of both, then Russia conquered Eurasia in reverse and Western kingdoms colonized the coasts of many seas.

Eurasia was a considerably more fast-paced, violent and top-down place indeed, and the pace and violence probably had a role in shaping the thought landscape.

“You have to go measure things in the real world, because nature surprises you,” Keith said at that conference in 2017.

He has continually stressed that the amount of material involved would represent a small fraction of the particulate pollution already emitted by planes, and that doing the same experiment for any other scientific purpose wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

I agree with that. It seems overblown that some folks were opposed to spreading two kilograms of limestone dust and measuring the result.

A single aerobatic flight of an ultralight aircraft with a smoke trail probably requires more pyrotechnical material, not to speak of fuel. Not to speak of a proper passenger or cargo flight. Not to speak of a satellite launch.

People already do the things anyway, only without properly understanding the results.

As for the argument that "then everyone will start experimenting" - well, that depends on the result of the previous expriment, does it not? And some do it anyway. China has a weather modification bureau, Saudi Arabia practises cloud seeding to increase chances of rainfall, etc.

The car is correctly represented, about 0.15 KWh / km is what one gets.

However, the positioning of the e-bike looks strange to me. I've looked at previous studies and the e-biker has always been first in efficiency - because the efficiency of a motor far exceeds the efficiency of human digestion and muscles, while weight and speed remain comparable to an ordinary cyclist.

I think someone has calculated food energy incorrectly, or assumed that e-bikes move faster than they do. :)

An exercise in game theory:

• first protester: blocks the road personally
• state: sends the protester to jail
• second protester: drops caltrops, hopefully on a slow-driving road
• state: huffs and puffs, but won't find the person

That wouldn't be a smart way to play this game. :( As long as civilized protest gets the goods (or has some effect), one should always prefer that. It's short-sighted to remodel the playing field to make it dangerous.

I hope the sentence will be something ridiculously small, because otherwise state is sending out a signal "you shouldn't get caught, consider real sabotage instead of civilized protest".

There is a pattern: more persistent heat waves, more persistent cold waves, more persistent wet and dry periods. On a planet that is a bit hotter on average, we get "more weather".

"What is the probability that the post will refer to Taiwan?" -- me, before opening the link :)

Yep, they have figured things out over there. :) Getting it right requires overcoming some obstacles, though:

• standardization
• modularization (if the vehicle needs more power, it has more than one battery of the same type)
• a future-proof control / ownership scheme

Standards do not emerge easily unless some player on the market is capable of achieving monopoly (a bad thing) and creating a de facto standard. Typically, to create a standard, an association of manufacturers is needed. Sometimes, a state or municipal body may also have to step in. For consumers to join the system, there must be some level of guarantee that the standard won't be temporary fad.

If the obstacles can be overcome, benefit for society is tangible and considerable. People will save time that would otherwise be spent waiting, and batteries can be slow-charged, prolonging their lifetime.

About the Taiwanese scheme, one can read here. They have a vertically integrated system where the same company provides charging places, batteries and scooters, and provides tehcnology to other scooter manufacturers so they can make compatible scooters. It has a market share of 33% so it's not a monopoly, but a big player. Their system is not perfect, there is room for improvement, but it's reasonably good in my opinion. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gogoro

They essentially say that (better) international cooperation is required, and must be functional at the required (global) scale... and the other paragraph essentially cautions that "some might find it easier to take from neighbours", leading to war, which is a proven and terrible waste of nearly all resources.

I would note that while we don't have a global society, we do have a global information space (enabling different actors to understand the same data and to see a mutual failure as the end of certain actions, even if their viewpoint differs) - and we do have global trade. Arrangements where an economy making a transiton off fossil fuels, for example, enacts carbon use limits locally and simultaneously taxes carbon-intensive imports across its borders, would remove the biggest dis-incentive to transitioning - that of getting things cheaper by polluting somewhere else.