[HN Gopher] Rivers are rapidly warming, losing oxygen; aquatic l...
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Rivers are rapidly warming, losing oxygen; aquatic life at risk,
study finds
Author : myshpa
Score : 81 points
Date : 2023-09-14 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eurekalert.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eurekalert.org)
| haltist wrote:
| Yesterday 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 wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| But 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 wrote:
| That'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 wrote:
| Transportation 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 wrote:
| What's very bad, that people have the freedom to use personal
| transportation? Would you rather see us on a bus or something?
| hedora wrote:
| Construction + buildings generate about 2x more CO2 per year
| than cars.
|
| If we want to maintain our exponential increase of CO2
| emissions in the face of EV adoption, we need to get people
| to tear out and replace existing construction.
|
| One way to do that is to rapidly build up low-cost, low-
| efficiency housing near bus and train lines.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Visit 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.
| TinyRick wrote:
| What's very bad is that we have an ongoing tragedy of the
| commons in the form of global climate change caused by human
| activity. What's even worse is that we know this, yet are not
| changing our society to alleviate the effects of our
| unsustainable carbon usage.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars.
| It's where the rich use public transportation."
| jiofj wrote:
| Sounds like a quote from a commissar.
| shintakezou wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| That isn't a good excuse though.
| chimineycricket wrote:
| That's not an excuse though.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The 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.
| tzs wrote:
| The article was about rivers in the US and central Europe
| though, so it is not clear to me how UK water company
| privatization policies are relevant.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Because the privatisation of UK water companies directly led
| to huge amount of shit being dumped in UK rivers.
|
| buy water company -> dump shit in rivers rather than treat it
| -> profit
| tzs wrote:
| But how does that warm rivers in the US and central Europe?
| JetSetWilly wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| And 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 wrote:
| Nobody privatized the rivers...
| autoexec wrote:
| The amount of monitoring, or even the amount of shit in the
| water aren't a good measure of how well privatization has
| served the public interest, at least not without context.
|
| Monitoring is a good thing to have, and clean water is a good
| thing to have. Those are valid metrics, but what also must be
| considered are the costs of providing those services, how
| available/accessible the services are to the public, the
| price the public pays for them, etc.
|
| I'd love to see an in depth analysis the impacts of
| privatization in the UK, but I'd be surprised if the public
| was better off because of it.
|
| In the end, privatization tends to be the worst option
| because of one simple fact: in addition to total compensation
| of all the costs required to provide the service to the
| public, the private entity also demands that they make a
| profit on top of that.
|
| A government can provide a service without any pressure to
| charge anything more than needed to keep the system going.
| Governments can even run essential services at a loss if
| needed. The government, unconcerned with personal enrichment,
| only has to worry about providing the best service to
| everyone.
|
| The private corporation only cares about profits and the
| endless growth of those profits so they will do anything to
| enrich themselves even at the expense of the public.
|
| Government is incentivized to provide what the public wants
| because when it fails they risk being voted out of office.
| Corporations are incentivized to provide as little as
| possible, spending as little as possible to provide it, while
| charging the public as much as possible and they are not
| accountable to the public at all.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _privatization tends to be the worst option because of
| one simple fact: in addition to total compensation of all
| the costs required to provide the service to the public,
| the private entity also demands that they make a profit on
| top of that_
|
| This applies to _all_ private efforts. Yet history shows
| the private sector can compete with public initiatives. The
| difference is competition. Water utilities don 't have
| competition. They're born into a mode of market failure.
| autoexec wrote:
| You're right. Competition changes the math substantially.
| It means the pubic can get tailored services that suit
| their unique needs and a large number of companies trying
| to one-up each other fuels innovation.
|
| The public is unlikely to be better off when the service
| being provided doesn't really allow for competition and
| utilities and infrastructure are great examples of that.
| For products and services where competition is desirable,
| easy, and plentiful I want those options and the
| government's role should be limited to regulating where
| necessary to ensure that competition stays strong and the
| public is protected.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Correction: The UK government privatised water companies in
| England and Wales. Not the UK. My mistake.
| autoexec wrote:
| The privatization of infrastructure is basically theft. Take
| from the public, and gift to private corporations that the
| public has no power over. The privatization of the public's air
| or water supply should be criminal.
| willmadden wrote:
| Too broad... I would say monopolies are the problem, both
| public and private.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| [dead]
| autoexec wrote:
| Monopolies are desirable (unavoidable?) in some cases. I
| don't want 35 competing toll roads running past my house.
| Natural monopolies, goods and services that will never be
| profitable (or would just never be as profitable as
| refusing to provide them would), and essential services are
| ideal for public monopolies. I'm not sure there's ever a
| situation where a private monopoly is the ideal though.
| rdedev wrote:
| The best way to evaluate it would be as a function of the
| elasticity of the service provided.
|
| I can avoid eating a pizza but not avoid taking a
| specific road. Besides it seems like any domain where the
| initial investment is large seems to be places where one
| monopoly eventually emerge.
|
| At least in my opinion healthcare (hospitals and such not
| including drug development) should not be private or of
| there is there should be a strong public hospital network
| for providing care
| gloryjulio wrote:
| Yep. Not saying public service is efficient, the
| privatisation of certain sectors like water and is much
| worse. The environment cost is just ignored and the public
| still get to foot the bill
| swader999 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I wonder how correlated this model is with reality.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The correlation is directly proportional to how alarmist it
| is.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Data 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.
| paint wrote:
| [flagged]
| adverbly wrote:
| What is the mechanism behind oxygen loss?
| sitkack wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication
| foxes wrote:
| I love unbridled capitalism, it's truly raised the living quality
| for everyone (the west).
|
| > Incinerates the planet
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(page generated 2023-09-14 23:01 UTC)