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
  • 52 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2023

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  • Stability is indeed a strength of EU - effectively averaging over all the countries smooths over political oscillations - which is useful for tackling long-term policy problems (like climate). I’m not advocating majoritarian voting where 51% overrides 49%. However with ± 30 countries, one or two should not block the rest - the current system leads to transactional brinkmanship where the last hold-outs get some prize in return for postponed obstruction. I’ve seen similar (worse) problems in UN climate negotiations - also due to “consensus” principle.


  • Orban is not forever - whereas integrating a country to EU is a long slow process. Also Budapest is geographically a hub city (whose inhabitants didn’t - mostly- vote for fidesz anyway). I find it hard to believe that hungarian people are so fundamentally different from their neighbours. So does it make sense to undo citizens’ EU membership for this? Rather, we need some kind of suspension of rights of the current government based on specific behaviour, such as persistent obstruction, distortion of the national media, etc. (although such criteria could apply to others too which might get embarrassing). And in general, to remove all vetos (aka “consensus”) from EU processes.




  • I use vscode as I develop this model in Scala3, whose language-server ‘metals’ integrates well with vscode, and when scala3 was new in mid-21 this was the platform they first targeted. But the scala command-line tools do the clever analysis, vscode provides the layout, colours, git integration, search/regex, web-preview etc… Now considering other options (eg zed) as vscode too dependent on potentially unsafe extensions (of which too much choice), also don’t want M$ scraping my code. Long ago when same model was in java I used netbeans, then eclipse. Would prefer a pure-scala toolset.





  • Hi, excuse me for replying so late, but i’ve been away from lemmy for.a while. Well, to summarise, the model calculates the future trajectories, of population, economy, emissions, atmospheric gases, and climate response etc., according to a set of (hundreds of) diverse options and uncertainties which you can adjust - the key feature is that the change shows rapidly enough to let you follow cause -> effect, to understand how the system responds in a quasi-mechanical way.
    Indeed you are right, complexity is beautiful, but hard. A challenge with such tools is to adjust gradually from simple to complex. Although SWIM has four complexity levels, they are no longer systematically implemented - also what seems simple or complex varies depending where each person is coming from, so i think to adapt the complexity filter into a topic-focus filter. Much todo …



  • As it happens I’ve been calculating per capita emissions for 28 years, since COP2. You can see my model here.
    No I certainly don’t include Russia nor Turkey, although europe is more than EU. Korea is indeed notable. Regarding what they call ‘consumption emissions’, you can get such data from Global Carbon Project, on that I’m less an expert but my hunch is that industry emissions are dominated by heavy products like steel and cement for construction (made with help of gigatons of coal), rather than light consumer goods for export. Over-construction is the root of the problem, global emissions will peak (maybe now) as that bubble bursts.