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Rivers are rapidly warming, losing oxygen; aquatic life at risk, study finds
- haltist 3y agoYesterday I did some amateur science and measured how many cars pass through a relatively busy intersection during rush hour. I knew it was pretty bad and did some basic math to confirm that things are indeed very bad. Expect things to continue to get worse. Fish stocks are already on the brink of collapse and I'm almost certain it will happen in my lifetime.
- birdyrooster 3y agoWhat percentage of the cars were electric? hybrids? diesel? hydrogen? natural gas? I am curious to hear your insights. I watch the traffic like this too and try to tally up as many as I can as I try to count 1000 cars. How do you record what you find?
- haltist 3y agoI just sampled the cars during a 1 minute window by recording with my phone camera and then counted cars in slow motion. I guess if I had access to the cameras at the intersection I could feed the data through an ML model and get a more accurate count but it wouldn't change the order of magnitude and it was already around 10k cars per hour (or thereabouts). The place I live is somewhat affluent so there are plenty of Teslas and electric cars but it's not enough to make a difference. Conservatively maybe 1 out of 50 is electric, not enough to make a difference in terms of pollution and CO2 output.
- dontlaugh 3y agoIt makes little difference. Even if electric cars were 4 more energy efficient than ICE cars (and considering their construction cost, they probably aren’t), that’s still nowhere near enough. They’re still cars. We could drop transportation energy use by at least 20 times if most of it was trains or trams.
- PaulKeeble 3y agoBut if they are charged on green power, and in many countries now they are especially over night, then they are vastly better than ICE vehicles. The goal with electrical vehicles isn't right now they are obviously greener (they are) but the true potential only comes when the supply is green power too which is happening at an accelerating rate. Plenty of those EV's will have been charged at home on Solar, people tend to do both.
- dontlaugh 3y agoThat’s quite rare. And you could just as well use ethanol and biodiesel for the same zero emissions result. The advantage of (small) electric cars is moving emissions away from people, not in total carbon emissions over the lifetime of the vehicle.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoTransportation is <30% of energy use in Europe. If that percentage is already too much (spoiler: it isn't) - you'd be screwed no matter what. The reality is, you're moving in the right direction about as fast as you can. Rome wasn't built in a day. We didn't get into this mess over night, and we're not getting out of it overnight either.
- jiofj 3y agoWhat's very bad, that people have the freedom to use personal transportation? Would you rather see us on a bus or something?
- ceejayoz 3y ago> What's very bad, that people have the freedom to use personal transportation? "Sometimes the things you do impact other people" is something we learn in very early childhood. > Would you rather see us on a bus or something? Yes?
- cooper_ganglia 3y ago“Just give up individual transportation and hop on the cattle truck!” isn’t exactly what I imagine when I think of what a decent future looks like. It’s very “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll like it” energy.
- ceejayoz 3y agoVisit somewhere with an effective public transportation system like the Netherlands or Switzerland to expand your imagination a little bit. "You'll own nothing, and you won't like it" is a whole bunch of folks' future if we continue to pretend our decisions don't have externalities.
- anigbrowl 3y agoI have a feeling you like to talk about the tragedy of the commons when it's something you don't have a personal stake in.
- throwaway290 3y agoElect a government that can provide better buses than cattle trucks. Like in developed countries.
- thefurdrake 3y agoIt's very "You'll think about the consequences of your actions if everyone else also does the same actions, and you'll like it" Kantian energy, you mean. Or maybe, "You'll stop engaging in activities that objectively harm those around you, and you'll like it". Just some alternate phrases for you to explore placing between quotes.
- swader999 3y agoThe international research team used artificial intelligence and deep learning approaches to reconstruct historically sparce water quality data from nearly 800 rivers across the U.S. and central Europe.
- TheBlight 3y agoI wonder how correlated this model is with reality.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoThe correlation is directly proportional to how alarmist it is.
- marcosdumay 3y agoData interpolation is something that people have been doing for centuries. Machine learning based interpolation is something people have been doing since the 90's. Nowadays, this is called AI. That by itself doesn't add or remove any credit to the study.
- swader999 3y agoRight! And I bet in the near future AI will do meta analyses studies using ones like this as it's basis.
- hermitcrab 3y agoThe British government privatised all the UK water companies some years ago. It turned out just about as well as you would expect. Turns out its much cheaper to pump shit into the rivers and risk the occasional paltry fine than to invest in infrastructure. Meanwhile you can load the water company with debt and pay massive dividends to the private equity companies and foreign investors that own the companies. And consumers have no choice, because each company is a monopoly. Marvellous.
- JetSetWilly 3y agoThis is completely false. The UK government privatised water companies in England. In Scotland the water remained nationalised. In recent years, the UK government started measuring water quality, by installing measurement devices absolutely everywhere in England. The measurement devices then show that the rivers have lots of shit in them. But the point is, the shit is not a new development - they always had shit. Meanwhile in Scotland, the rivers are not monitored, there's a pathetically small quantity of measurement devices installed. Hence there's no scandal in Scotland because ignorance is bliss I suppose, not because nationalised water is somehow amazingly better. Somehow people with a narrative to push turn this into a tale of how privatisation is terrible despite there being no evidence to back this up whatsoever.
- Iwan-Zotow 3y agoAnd why UK (whole UK I guess?) gvmnt isn't installing devices in Scotland? > show that the rivers have lots of shit in them irrelevant to Scotland, isn't it in itself indication that water privatization was shit?
- justrealist 3y agoNobody privatized the rivers...
- Iwan-Zotow 3y agoBut water clean-up/discharge is private, isn't it?
- paint 3y ago[flagged]
- shintakezou 3y agoIt will be just a different world. Maybe not for humans (and certain aquatic life), but there are a lot of ways and life will find a way. If not now, then — sooner or later.
- junon 3y agoThat isn't a good excuse though.
- chimineycricket 3y agoThat's not an excuse though.
- n40487171 3y agoBlue-green algae will fill that void, and those living in affected areas will need to use activated carbon water filters.
- foxes 3y agoI love unbridled capitalism, it’s truly raised the living quality for everyone (the west). > Incinerates the planet
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago[Taps roof of atmosphere] "You can fit so many corpses in this model!"
- adverbly 3y agoWhat is the mechanism behind oxygen loss?