Polar Ice, 2050, Proof-of-Stake
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Satellite imagery shows Antarctic ice shelf crumbling faster than thought / Reuters
Arctic warming four times faster than rest of Earth / Phys.org
We’ve long known that there are tipping-point features around the world that could speed up the climate transition from “where we’ve been throughout recorded human history” to “someplace new that will almost certainly mess with our perception of normal and cause a lot of damage in the process,” and the Arctic and Antarctic ice pockets (and their climate-regulating effects) fit into that category.
We don’t 100% known what will happen once these stockpiles of ice disappear (or even diminish more significantly than they already have), but it does seem fairly certain that coastal cities will have more to worry about, freshwater could be harder to come by, and our weather patterns will be further messed-with in possibly significant ways.
Researchers agree the world can reach a 100% renewable energy system by or before 2050 / Helsinki Times
There are many substantial barriers between where we are today in our transition to full-electrification and the installation of renewable energy sources (which will produce the electricity we need).
Those hurdles are high and tricky to leap, but it’s becoming clearer every year that we’re actually in a good position to overcome them, all things considered.
In other words: there’s long been optimism that we can fully transition to renewables by 2050—which is considered to be a milestone year in this effort—but now we’ve got a lot more data supporting that (optimistic) assumption.
It won’t be cheap or easy, but we can do it—even if lackluster political will doesn’t always seem to imply as much.
Ethereum’s big proof-of-stake blockchain switch could happen on September 15th / The Verge
This is big climate news because many crypto-assets currently rely upon blockchains that use what’s called a “proof-of-work” protocol to function, and that’s a highly energy-intensive process (at times, Bitcoin mining—the process of creating more Bitcoin tokens—consumes more energy than a mid-sized country).
“Proof-of-stake,” on the other hand, allows for essentially the same work to be done, but via a mechanism that’s comparably energy-sipping.
And Ethereum is the second-largest crypto-asset, globally (after Bitcoin), and has a lot of secondary-assets based on its platform. So Ethereum switching over could spark a sea-change in the energy-intensiveness of the crypto-world, more broadly.
Also
We’re going to need a lot of solar panels
Humanity’s biggest problems require a whole new media mode
Germany’s perception of nuclear energy is changing (pretty dramatically, too—which makes sense, given the chaos blocked flows of Russian energy is causing, thereabouts)
Extreme heat in the UK is crashing computers (which in turn are crashing hospitals)
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