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This happens nearly every year in Italy. Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at ris
by fedeb95 1mo ago
This happens nearly every year in Italy.
Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at risks building up slowly.
I don't know if it is true, but by today still voting for parties denying climate change all the way and that have done nothing in past years to prevent this type of risks is crazy.
- phtrivier 1mo agoIt must be hard to discuss that in Italy, where millions of tourist (like me) queue to visit Pompei (or, better in my opinion, Herculanum), and then go back to their AirBnB in... Napoli, aka the backyard of an active volcano. As a friend says, "Our collective cognitive dissonance is something I would not want to climb with a bike."
- brabel 1mo agoIt’s very different to visit a risk area as a tourist. Your chances of being buried are slim for a particle week. But for the people living there every day, the statistics compound. For a long enough period it’s almost guaranteed you will suffer. In the case of the downhill villages in Nepal, everyone knew those lakes would eventually burst , and in a matter of a few years. To continue building and living in those areas was completely reckless and I want to believe that anywhere in Europe they would have evacuated such villages decades before disaster.
- eliaspro 1mo agoIn Germany we just rebuild everything in an area (Ahrtal) devastated by one of the worst floods in local history...
- chinathrow 1mo agoBy the amount of (some of it useless) tech we've come to build in the last 3 decades, we should have arrived at the stage where we can collectively control the CO2 levels in our atmosphere, by now. For ever. We failed.
- sfn42 1mo agoWe can increase them, it's just really hard to decrease them which is why scientists have been telling us to stop increasing the CO2 levels for about a century.
- srean 1mo agoIndeed. Cutting down on annual emissions will not be accompanied by reduction in atmospheric CO2, unless the current rate of emission is lower than that of natural processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere. That's why atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, despite cuts, if the cuts at global scale are at all real.
- wafflemaker 1mo agoIt's not hard, it just takes a lot of energy. Enough cheap energy (that doesn't produce CO2) and some incentive and you could have CO2 slowly removed. Like in Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez.
- ghosty141 1mo agoTrees are that and they don't even need human intervention.
- lovich 1mo agoThere’s some projects trying to figure out carbon capture that’s net negative for co2 emissions like Vesta[1], but yea, we haven’t done nearly enough. [1] https://www.vesta.earth/science#Duck-Pilot https://www.vesta.earth/science#Duck-Pilot
- embedding-shape 1mo ago> Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at risks building up slowly. I have a tiny lithium battery on a desk in my lab that started swelling about a week ago. I've been meaning to go to the recycle place every day since then to drop it off, but nothing exploded yet, so here I sit with a slightly swollen battery some meters away from me. I'd say you're just about right :)
- V__ 1mo agoFingers crossed it doesn't burn your house down when your out and about. At least put it somewhere outside.
- embedding-shape 1mo agoI have plenty of fire alarms, both local and remote, and extinguishers of different types around, I'm not too worried :) But thanks for the concern kind stranger!
- Epa095 1mo agoAt least put it in a coffee cup or something like that!
- toss1 1mo agoYES!! The other thing to do is discharge it, so it has little energy stored to maintain/enlarge a fire A drone engineer I worked with would immediately put any suspect battery into a barrel of water for several days, then get them disposed of properly. The risk really seems trivial, probably because of our extensive experience with ordinary alkaline and NiCad batteries with a very benign degradation pattern, but the risk with Li-Ion is no joke. All your fire extinguishers will do you no good if it goes off while you are out of the house. Also, the fire extinguishers will only suppress the surrounding fire, and do nothing about the core Li-Ion fire itself.
- cucumber3732842 1mo ago>Someone said that it's because we humans are very good at reacting at immediate danger and very bad at reacting at risks building up slowly. Humans are really good at stealing, lying, beating their wives and all sorts of other bad shit too but you don't see people going around saying "aw shucks, it's just nature, whatcha gonna do". One of the benefits of society is to tame human nature in such a way that we all benefit more than we lose and those benefits let us outcompete the adjacent society whether that's the cavemen or a nation state. Whichever society figures out how to marginalize the voice of the unprincipled, the emotional, those who lie with plausible deniability for their own (often not even financial, just in their own damn head) self interest and overall detriment will mop the floor with the rest of them.
- lazide 1mo agosquints I mean, I’ve literally heard people do that for all of those things.
- DrBazza 1mo agoPeople are good at reacting to a common danger. Look at the Boxing Day Tsunami - people standing and watching the sea as they just didn't know what it was as they had never seen it before. This month a 'hunger stone' appeared in the Danube, indicating the levels for pre-20th century famine. And various other markers in many countries for 'the water reached this level', ironically, on the side of existing buildings. Yet we build closer and closer to rivers because (flash) flood events happen rarely, and typically not in our lifetime.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1mo ago> typically not in our lifetime. That's changing. Even though I'm 64, I suspect that I'll be seeing a lot of "not in my lifetime" stuff happening, before I pop my clogs.
- DrBazza 1mo agoYou're a little bit older than me - and I recall reading that 'our era' is actually pretty unusual for how quiet it has been in terms of natural disasters and their magnitudes. Last major volcanic eruption around lots of humans: Krakatoa - 1883 Last major M9 earthquake before Sumatra: Chile - 1960 and so on. Things seem a bit more 'major' now because there's 7bn+ people.