human actions, global climate change, global human solutions by 1kiki

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

human actions, global climate change, global human solutions

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Monday, August 31, 2026 06:03
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Friday, July 10, 2026 8:35 AM

Wow... I'm just looking at other bullshit you've posted in this thread.

Man... I wish I cared enough to start going back through all of your posts here and just shove all of the bullshit that never happened right up your ass.

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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2026 6:10 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Europe’s Summer of Reckoning Is ‘Just the Beginning’

The continent is experiencing some of its biggest fires and highest temperatures ever. Residents are fleeing, leaders are struggling to respond and “it will get worse,” one climate expert said.

By Mark Landler and Chico Harlan | July 29, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/world/europe/summer-heat-wave-fires
-climate-change.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2VA.0R-X.wlgd__cj5u73&smid=tw-share

A dense, yellow-orange pall hung over Bordeaux on Sunday, blotting out the sun and blurring the spires of the cathedral in this French city. A swirl of tiny ash particles stung eyes and stuck in throats. Twenty miles west of town, a mammoth forest fire burned so ferociously that it generated its own weather system.

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” said Roger Peuron, 89, a retired engineer born before World War II, who was driven out of his home by the approaching flames. He could have been speaking for millions of people across Europe.

Ravenous fires. Searing heat waves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval — ruinous wars, deadly pandemics — it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.

It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

It has forced the cancellation of concerts and festivals, curtailed the final stage of the Tour de France cycling race and closed the Louvre Museum and Eiffel Tower early. It brought wildfires to the Scottish Highlands. It led organizers in London to call off a conference on how to cope with extreme heat. And it caused at least 10,000 heat-related deaths across Europe in June alone — a number that may turn out to be an undercount.

“Europe is ground zero when it comes to impacts” from climate change, said Johan Rockström, a Swedish scientist who is the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

“2026 is just the beginning,” Professor Rockström added. “It will inevitably get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I’m afraid, we’ll be passing the limits of adaptation.”

Europe is not alone, of course. Heat waves gripped Australia and Japan this year. Floods devastated Kenya and Angola. A snowstorm paralyzed the Eastern United States. Developing countries in the Southern Hemisphere are still more vulnerable than wealthy Europe to the effects of a changing climate.

Yet no other continent has warmed as rapidly as Europe, at nearly twice the global average since the mid-1990s. That has forced Europeans to confront, more starkly than others, the harsh realities of a changed climate, particularly in the summer, when their once-mild days have given way to furnacelike heat.

Though still cooler than other parts of the world, like the American Southwest or the Persian Gulf region, Europe is less able to cope because its buildings are often without air-conditioning and were built to retain heat. The homogeneity of the trees on its hillsides and coastal plains, many of which were planted during cooler, wetter periods, make them dangerously flammable during fire season.

“With this heat wave and these fires, you can say it starts to become unbearable,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a Swiss climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

Whether it leads to drastic new measures — either to mitigate the effects of a warmer climate or to adapt to them — is another question.

In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared a “climate emergency,” which he said would necessitate a state pact to “attack the root of the problem in a structural way.” In France, President Emmanuel Macron vowed to replant the vast pine forests that were burned in the Gironde region over the last week with different species of trees that are better suited to a dry, hot climate.

“The situation we’re in today is the most difficult we’ve ever recorded, the most difficult since World War II,” Mr. Macron said.

Yet for all the urgency, Europe’s commitment to reduce carbon dioxide emissions — a goal that scientists say is the only conclusive way to curb climate change — is in danger of being watered down. This month, the European Union proposed to adjust rules so that some industries could pollute at slightly higher levels, further into the future.

“Net zero” policies, which aim to balance the greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere with the amount removed, have become inviting targets for critics, particularly on the right, who condemn them as a luxury Europe can’t afford during a period of weak economic growth and energy insecurity. And no matter what Europe does, the global trajectory depends on China and the United States, where President Trump has called climate change a “con job,” as well as on energy-hungry developing countries.

“We have Ursula von der Leyen struggling to maintain the current commitment,” Professor Rockström said, referring to the president of the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm. “What’s happening in France and Spain means that we should increase our ambition level, not reduce it.”

One way to do that, he said, is to educate the public about the causal link between a warming climate and the calamitous fires of the last week. The disaster unfolded in a vicious, if entirely logical, chain reaction.

First, record-setting heat waves dried out soil and vegetation, which had become abundant after a wet winter. Then, wildfires near Bordeaux and the Spanish capital, Madrid, feasted on that kindling. On Wednesday morning, officials in Gironde said the fire had been stable overnight. But a fresh heat wave threatened to worsen conditions just as firefighters were making progress in containing it.

Earlier hot spells exposed other European vulnerabilities. In late June, train operators canceled routes and France temporarily halted several nuclear reactors to avoid discharging overheated water into already-warm rivers. As a drought intensified, low water levels in the Danube and Rhine Rivers snarled river traffic.

Europe’s status as the fastest-warming continent is a consequence of both changing weather patterns and its proximity to the Arctic, where reduced snow and ice lead to more dark surfaces that absorb heat.
Smoke rising last week from wildfires in Le Porge, southwestern France, a village badly damaged by the blazes.

The continent is more than 1.6 degrees Celsius, or 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than it was three decades ago, and the rise in temperature is swift enough to be noticeable over a single generation. By the start of this week, France had recorded 53 heat waves since 1947; 28 of them occurred in the last 15 years.

Bordeaux never experienced a day with temperatures at or above 39 degrees Celsius (102.2 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1921 and 2000, according to Météo-France, the national climate and weather service. This summer, it has happened eight times, including on Wednesday, and the season is not even half over. Bordeaux’s winemakers, already beleaguered by the heat, now worry about smoke tainting their famous vineyards.

Friederike Otto, a German climatologist at Imperial College London, said “jet-stream” wind patterns and high-pressure systems once could lock in days of “nice-ish summer weather” in Europe. Now, she said, those same dynamics produce excruciating conditions because they occur in tandem with a warmer climate.

The most frightening aspect of Europe’s summer, scientists say, is that it could appear tame in retrospect. The planet is already on course to breach the central goal of the Paris Agreement of 2015: to stop the planet from heating more than two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than preindustrial levels.

Far from moderating, some experts say the pace of warming appears to be accelerating. France’s weather and climate service has painted a dystopian picture, saying that by 2050, heat waves could be five times more frequent, while temperatures could hit 118 degrees Fahrenheit.

At a cavernous exhibition center in Bordeaux, where thousands of evacuees took shelter on Sunday, that future had already arrived. Yet Céline Lartigue, 51, a social worker, had to reach into Europe’s ancient past to describe the ashes and orange sky she witnessed as she fled her house in the suburb of St.-Médard-en-Jalles, where factories manufacture the propellant for France’s nuclear missiles.

“It was like Pompeii,” she said.

Giulia Imbert contributed reporting from Paris.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, August 31, 2026 6:03 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Solar Has Crossed a Critical Economic Tipping Point

By Leon Stille - Aug 29, 2026, 4:00 PM CDT

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-Has-Crossed
-a-Critical-Economic-Tipping-Point.html

• Solar now requires no more upfront capital than coal or gas to produce the same annual electricity, reversing a disadvantage that was as large as five-to-one a decade ago.

• Batteries and wider grid flexibility still add real system costs, but firm solar-plus-storage is already competitive with new fossil generation in favorable markets.

• For capital-constrained emerging economies, solar no longer means paying more today to save money tomorrow. Increasingly, it is the cheaper entry ticket as well.

For years, the economic case for solar came with an awkward qualification. Yes, it had no fuel bill. Yes, its operating costs were low. And yes, over the life of a project it could already produce cheaper electricity than a new coal or gas plant. But first, someone had to pay for it.

Solar concentrated most of its lifetime costs at the beginning. Fossil power appeared to ask for less capital upfront and spread the rest of the bill across decades of coal or gas purchases. In rich countries with deep capital markets, that distinction could be managed. In emerging economies facing high interest rates, limited public budgets and competing infrastructure needs, it could determine what was built.

That disadvantage has now largely disappeared. According to a new Ember analysis, a solar plant can now require less upfront investment than a coal or gas plant for the same amount of electricity delivered. A decade ago, solar could require up to five times as much. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-electric-fast-track-for-e
merging-markets/

This is not another claim that solar has become cheaper on a lifetime basis. That happened years ago. It is a more fundamental tipping point: solar is now competing with fossil fuels before the first tonne of coal or cubic meter of gas is purchased.

Fossil Power Has Lost Its Financing Shortcut

Comparisons between power technologies are often distorted by nameplate capacity. One megawatt of solar does not produce the same annual electricity as one megawatt of gas, because the sun does not shine continuously. Ember therefore compares the capital required to deliver the same quantity of electricity rather than simply matching the number printed on the generator.

That is the economically relevant comparison. In the past, solar needed considerably more installed capacity to produce the same annual output, while solar modules themselves were far more expensive. The resulting capital burden created a simple argument for fossil fuels: build the cheaper plant now and pay for fuel later.

Mass manufacturing has dismantled that argument. Solar PV's total installed cost has fallen by 87% since 2010, according to IRENA. Module production has become a vast, standardized industrial process. Efficiency has improved, supply chains have expanded and installation experience has accumulated across almost every major market.

Solar's capital profile has not changed, it still requires most expenditure upfront. The amount of capital required has.

That distinction is especially important in countries that import fossil fuels. A gas plant may look affordable on the day it is commissioned, but every megawatt-hour it generates creates another fuel purchase. Solar effectively prepays much of its energy supply for the next 25 to 30 years.

The old choice was between a capital-heavy clean asset and a cheaper fossil asset with recurring fuel costs. Increasingly, it is between two similarly priced assets, one of which arrives with a permanent fuel bill.

Much more at https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Solar-Has-Crossed
-a-Critical-Economic-Tipping-Point.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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