benjhm

I remember in 2011 passing the village below the dam - now under the red mud - a disaster waiting to happen, obvious even to a bus passenger. That local bus in which I traveled was run by the same mining company, who employed most people around there. If that's still the case, suppose they'll still control what's done with the fund money.

To make the most of the wind they'd need a flexible route adapting to the weather forecast (about 5 days in advance), a deal with rail companies to complete journeys along coasts would help make that doable.
Indeed the fences along railways are an issue, but likewise for big roads, eco-bridges with trees can help (there are examples eg in netherlands iirc).
An interplanetary drone to harvest gas for gentle wind-driven balloons back on earth, interesting combination of tech... but first priority I guess would be to keep the He on our planet (avoid leaks -> lost due to escape velocity).

Indeed, and it’s good you clarify this. Handy to have a crazier fringe party to publicly open such topics.

Orban also made it obvious, walking about with a t-shirt showing a map of 'make hungary great again'. On that map, Zakarpatia is small compared to Transylvania, and the whole of Slovakia, however EU membership kills such dreams, so... Beautiful green mountains by the way, very peaceful area.

If we get the lower end of these projections, you might plausibly live to see a world with a billion people less than now, but to see a world with less than a billion total you'd have to have an extremely long lifetime, which implies some medical breakthrough, in which case, unless you have some super-exclusive access, the population would stop declining, just get super geriatric. I suppose there are other ways to do get there, such as global nuclear war, but even that might let quite a few people continue in the southern hemisphere.

If you believe their figures, it's notable that although North Korea has about half the population of the South, it currently has more babies. Could lead to interesting situation regarding potential re-unification (although not likely any time soon...).

The discussion below the original article mentions "Caspian Sea Monster" - which uses "ground effect", but there are more modern versions that are not monsters - for example this electric sea-glider might be promising for coastal trips ?

I like this idea, the views could be fantastic. The article mentions the problem of prevailing winds - so plan circular trips following the trade winds, as sailing ships used to do. For example, from Spain to the Carribbean, up the coast, back further north (recall - global empires were run without plane-speed, people traveled the world and had interesting lives). Complement the network with sleeper trains overland where practical - for example train down the african coast, down brazilian coast, airship to cross narrowest gap). 48 hours transatlantic, that's nothing compared to a week or more on trans-siberian (although a modern tgv could do Paris-Shanghai in about 48 hrs - if political will instead of obstacles).
Side thought - is there an issue regarding supply of Helium (or energy cost to separate it ...?) if scaling this up?

Well, regarding CO~2~ globally on longish timesscale it seems the numbers add up, as there are multiple independent ways of checking the carbon budget - so if there would be a lot more emissions, we'd have to assume greater sinks to balance (the terrestrial biosphere sink is usually considered the greatest uncertainty). However for some trace gases such as HFCs, indeed it was found that measurements (even in middle of europe, e.g. at Jungfraujoch) sometimes indicated more emissions than governments were admitting to. For methane it's harder to say as there are also 'natural' sources, not so well quantified.

Indeed, first step is to get people to think on those timescales - and the cathedrals are a good example that people used be able to do that. I make an interactive climate model normally running from 1750 to 2250 (could go further) so it’s ± symmetrical about the present, but society attitudes are not. For example, it’s normal to pay to preserve 'heritage' sites from 100 - 1000 - more years ago, but [most] economists imply (with discount rates) it's crazy to care about it all disappearing under the sea on any similar timescale.

If there's such a large methane leak from those LNG ships, I wonder is this missing from global ghg accounting ?- as it's not within a nation, and normally ship emissions are just CO~2~ and SO~x~. At least, as an immediate step, somebody should be paying a big tax for leaked CH~4~ (could increase the gas price here in europe...)

Pretty images from far away (for most of us) ... but don't forget Laki volcano on Iceland led to two years without a summer harvest, and hence to the french revolution - these eruptions can have a big influence on history (future)...