... then they start talking about km^2 of lost surface area. Which if you read the paper they cite, it says "Between 1984 and 2015 permanent surface water has disappeared from an area of almost 90,000 square kilometres, roughly equivalent to that of Lake Superior, though new permanent bodies of surface water covering 184,000 square kilometres have formed elsewhere." On top of that, shallow lakes fluctuate wildly in surface area. The great Salt Lake for example. VS Lake Tahoe which can drop 10 ft and the surface area loss is tiny.
Yes of course the relationship between volume and area depends on the lake depth, are you suggesting the paper implied anything else? The Great Salt Lake has dropped rather dramatically in the last ten years, so much so that it has already changed pretty much all recreation and commercial activity on the lake - the primary boat dock closed because the marina was completely dry and by last year the shores had moved inward, by kilometers in some cases. Unusual precipitation this year has brought levels up a little, but this might only be a blip in the downward trend. The known reasons include drought conditions, unusually high temperatures, and greater upstream use. The Great Salt Lake’s recent history very much backs up the claims of this paper, no?
I really enjoyed Giri and Caruana's commentary. I can't really understand chess at the WC level but listening to them explain it along side IMs shows that even IMs are in similar a position. Sure they understand more than I do but they miss most of the deeper or sutbler ideas.
We need to optimize for "tonnes of CO2 scrubbed per dollar". This cost includes capital cost, and energy cost.
Because location doesn't matter, putting lots of small battery-powered mobile units is always going to lose to a large fixed industrial unit with an industrial-scale energy supply. Probably orders of magnitude worse on both CAPEX and OPEX.
Who is going to pay for a lot of extra power and reduced driving range for the idea in the article, the power costing far in excess per year than planting two trees (which would do more for the environment)?
I's clear that with many environmental matters, and specifically atmospheric CO2, we are at the tragedy of the commons, and have been for a long while, and strategies should be around getting us out of there.
My English teacher was a huge arsehole and great anglophile. He would throw the well-known phrases around like "sail a convict ship to Australia with a crew of ten", "the war was won on the playing fields of Eton" & so on.
