benjhm

Interesting discussion. 'Quit while ahead' sounds obvious with hindsight, but who can say when a peak has been reached during events, and who, in such movements, would have the authority to impose that on others ? What could China learn from other countries ? For example, rapid student-led change in Bangladesh recently.

What better times? They'll be competing with more solar and wind every year (also fewer people).

I think it makes sense. China also has a housing surplus, loads of infrastructure, plenty of educated graduates, and great diversity of climate (therefore resilience to that problem), but will lack young people to help with services. The first generation will feel discrimination (even europeans who've worked there know the laowai feeling) but attitudes could gradually change for their children.

Key message remains that methane is "the strongest lever we can quickly pull to reduce warming".
It's not runaway, but there is a positive feedback of methane increasing its own lifetime by using up atmospheric oxidising capacity. I note also, new to me - "an increase in decomposition rates from wetlands as higher temperatures interacted with La Niña conditions in the tropics" - so during El Niño we get more CO2 from forest fires, but during La Niña more CH4 ... - how to lock-in that carbon ? I also wonder how much methane is coming from Russia recently, whose government cares the least of all.

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.

Moi j'ai fait du vin ici en wallonie - 50 bouteilles en 2023 avec seulement trois vignes - un grimpant sur la facade de ma maison, les autres pendant entre arbres at bambous, donc ils prennent peut d'espace et donnent de l'ombre fraiche en été.

Interesting - especially regarding the linguistic isolation factor, making it easy to dominate media.
Although even among many similar slavic languages, I wonder how many people are listening to other country's media. And if we look at other isolated languages in Europe, eg. Finland, Basque, Albania, it's hard to see a pattern in political consequences.

I agree. The key symbiosis between coral and microalgae depends on fundamental thermodynamic equilibria of the carbonate chemistry of seawater - which are highly sensitive to temperature and atmospheric CO2, in very predictable ways. When living in coral becomes unprofitable for the algae, they leave. My instinct, from some experience with this system, is that introducing new species won't do better than nature, nobody can beat thermodynamics. We have to reduce the CO2.

I wonder to what extent the western powers in Trianon were also motivated to punish the experiment with communism during summer of 1919 ? And how memory of this continues to influence modern views?
Later, the Soviet union extracted products and resources cheaply from its satellites - did this contribute to resentment of Ukraine as the transit country (I heard similar from Romanians)?
Today, the rural - urban political divide is similar in many other corners of europe, or even usa. I just wonder why the power balance in this case seems to be skewed away from the younger educated 'city people' in Budapest - maybe also specific demographics relating to those borders ?

Key message makes sense. But seems odd to use a photo of a Russian train to illustrate an article about Australia ...

China by now has made a large contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere - which leads to sea-level-rise, ocean acidification etc., imposing adaptation costs on these islands. These cause-effect links can be calculated quite accurately, so a case could be made to swap financial debt for climate debt (within, of course, a context of global deals where all big emitters contribute reasonable shares). In these specific cases it would be peanuts for China's budget, it’s more the diplomatic precedent they'd oppose.

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.