It still means the same thing, or at least, it still has the potential to be read the wrong way.

Perhaps better might be something along the lines of "China sinks 6 million PC equivalent, 1400-ton, data centre in the sea".

I note, with little surprise, that you failed to provide a source for your 'understanding'.

I'll also add that the engineers and scientists who do the lifecycle analysis on them have no need to "sell panels".

What a shame you won't even debate in good faith...

Your understanding is incorrect. Even in places quite a ways from the equator, like the uk at ~51 degrees north, the energy return is roughly 2 to 3 times the embodied energy of the panel.

Since this information is readily available, I find myself wondering: where does your understanding come from?

You provide financial and social incentives to encourage homeowners to, for example, insulate their lofts, foam fill cavity walls, clad (either internally or externally) external walls, install solar panels, fit double glazing, install a heat pump, and so on.

Now, I'll admit that some minimal effort has been put into the financial incentives side, although they fell woefully short of what was actually required. They were limited in scope and number, were poorly marketed, were actually opposed and disparaged by a vocal section of the government of the day, and the incentives offered were not of sufficient magnitude for the majority of people to make use of the offer, if they even heard about it in the first place.

What? Poor government in the UK? Plus ca change...

Considering just about everything in a solar panel is recyclable (aluminium, silver, poly & crystalline silicon), and, if done at scale, more (price and energy) efficiently than making new panels from raw materials, one has to wonder wtf is going on there...

Broadly speaking a combination of 3 factors: Initial build cost (not to mention supply constraints), the cost of (that) capital, and risk management. Oh, and greed. There's also something of a fk'd up 'market' operating in the UK, and an incompetent government with no consistent, long term, industrial strategy, which doesn't help when it comes to businesses looking to make long term investments.

One of the linked sources states: "It is expected to generate 245 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year".

Where the subsequent article got its figures from I'm not sure.

Anyway, I think that works out at providing each of those 50,000 houses with ~13kWh / day.

Somewhat ironically, you've picked a prime example of when government regulation (c.f. The Inclosures Act(s)) created an arguably worse situation than it was designed to solve.

However, you're not wrong, per se. I'd add that it's not wrong to regulate in response to something 'novel', i.e. regulation that changes an existing situation that hadn't been foreseen before it happened. The current business response to this, however, has been a string of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) clauses in international trade agreements, as though corporations have a god given right to fuck up the world or get paid for not doing so.

Agreed! I just wish I had more confidence in our elected governments' abilities to a) look out for their citizens as priority no. 1, rather than the the interests of corporations; and b) consider the (long and short term) ramifications of their legislation. Based on current observations this doesn't seem to be the case.

Not much calculation required.

From the document you linked to (thanks!): the guideline dose is 7610 Bq/L (pg. 4)
From here: the level of radiation in the treated water is ~1500 Bq/L

Ergo, it's (relatively) safe to drink...

The Guardian making a 'factor of a thousand error' in their reporting would be news, so I had to go and read the article, and you're right, the paper's authors did use Gt, albeit as follows: "We find that Antarctic ice shelves exported 67,000 ± 3200 billion tonnes (Gt) of freshwater to the Southern Ocean from 1997 to 2021"

Perhaps you'd like to now weigh in on what a thousand Gt (or a Tt) is in common parlance?

Why, exactly? It's far more readable. I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who understand what a trillion is outnumber the number of people who know what the prefix Tera (or even Giga, for that matter) means by a factor of ~100 to 1.

One pedant deserves another...

When an article states, for example, "Europe mulls <doing something>..." it's pretty clear that 'Europe' is being used as a shorthand for 'The European Union', or more accurately yet 'The legislative branch* of the European Union', as 'Europe' itself is a continent, and has no will nor ability to do anything (well, except float serenely on a sea of lava at a pace of about 3cm / year).

Once one arrives at this realisation the apparent tautology (if indeed it is such, rather than merely a redundancy) disappears, as the UK is no longer in the EU.

HTH...

* I'll draw the line at debating whether the Commission, which proposes new rules, is actually a true legislature, as opposed to the Parliament. Even my pedantry knows limits!

The article he linked to included the paragraph "“We were shocked by what we discovered in these images,” says Gallaher. “We thought, OK, all reports from the 1960s were that it was colder, so we expected to see a lot more sea ice. In fact, 1964 was the largest sea ice extent until 2014. Then in 1966 we saw the lowest ice extent that was ever seen. This was totally unexpected. There’s a lot more variability in sea ice extent than we ever could have imagined.”"

As to where the specific figure of 16 million square km came from, I'm afraid I'm at a loss. While the data is searchable (at NSIDC) it's not particularly 'amateur' user friendly, and I've got others things I should be doing... :-/

I do think that it's worth pointing out that this summary of the project's findings, includes these lines: "With those images, Campbell produced the first satellite maps of the sea ice edge in 1964 and an estimate of September sea ice extent for both the Arctic and the Antarctic. According to the data, September Antarctic sea ice extent measured about 19.7 million square kilometers. “That’s higher than any year observed from 1972 to 2012,” Meier said."

Yearly variability is to be expected. Take a look at this image showing Arctic sea ice levels. If we looked at only 1996 one could say "look, sea ice hasn't declined at all since records began"; if instead we only looked at the period 2010-2012 one could say "at this rate there'll be no sea ice left in 5 years time". Obviously both extremes are ludicrous.

The long term trend, however, is blatantly obvious.

I thoroughly enjoyed it too, but only after I'd edited the executable with a hex editor to change one 'word'. Without that edit the game crashed upon trying to leave the bar for the first time. Every time! I'd call that pretty game breaking.

There were numerous other little niggles, a couple of quests that were impossible to complete (some because it was possible to perform some of the quest advancement triggers before reaching that stage of the questline, meaning that if [and based on their positioning, more likely when] you did them was no longer possible to trigger the advance, some simply because you happened to take the 'wrong' route to get to the quest location, and some ... god knows why), and the 'linear' nature of the game meant that no matter how quickly you completed the game, how few steps you took to get there, the character was always at the same stage of 'psychosis' by the end. That broke 'immersion' in a big way, for me.

That said, some of the quest lines were great (e.g. the 'crucifixion'), and overall I was pretty impressed. I certainly got my money's worth out of the game, and, once I'd tracked down how to fix the initial bug, was not at all unhappy I bought it at launch.

I guess, with these new patches and content updates, it might be worth taking another look at it, see if the couple of things I never completed are now properly fixed.

There are, of course, other alternatives which you seem to have failed to consider, or even acknowledge.

It's a big world, and 'simplifying' things to a false dichotomy of democratic or communist, or even capitalist or communist, would be to ignore reality as it is today, and hence be a bad starting place for determining what we should do going forward.

You were saying?

This single exception aside, however, I fear your opinion is more likely than not to be broadly correct, for the next ~20 years. Once more scientists and green politicians have shot themselves in the foot by pushing for "net zero by 2050". Businesses then interpreted this as "there's no need for us to stop doing anything until 2050, phased transition be damned".

The insanity (on both 'sides') is mind boggling!