Shout out to the gulf stream for keeping Ireland's climate significantly more temperate than our Canadian latitude neighbours. As kids when we looked out to sea on the west coast we thought next stop was New York, but it's more like Newfoundland. If (when?) the gulf stream gets significantly disrupted it's gonna be a major shock
Interesting. Is there other research on this? How well tested is the mode?
It is something i have wondered about because proximity to the heat in the sea is clearly an important factor too, so i am interested. Surely the Gulf Stream must have some impact?
The article doesn’t say that the ocean is irrelevant just that it’s not the oceanic currents that dominate. The main thing is just having an ocean at all coupled with prevailing winds being west to east. Hence Seattle, which is mild but does not benefit from Gulf Stream like currents
Yes, I get that. To clarify I meant proximity to heat in the sea "stored" from warmer times of the year without the effect of the Gulf Stream is clearly an important factor.
Ireland's climate policies, whether adequate or inadequate, can have very little affect on the evolution of the AMOC, or any other large-scale climactic phenomenon. There are vastly more influential factors at play all around the world.
Inasmuch as it’s a country of five million people you are right in absolute terms, but considering the government’s shocked Pikachu face reaction to being held to the terms of an agreement Ireland signed up to it’s still a bit galling.
One of the best things Ireland could do is build lots of housing close to job centres so people don’t have to drive so far to work, or ideally can take public transport (or bike or walk)
It’s remarkable seeing people commute to Dublin from tullamore or even athlone.
Relying less on concrete would help too, wood construction seems to be getting more common at least.
"As far as current models suggest, we conclude that the risk of a northern AMOC shutdown is greater than previously thought,” Drijfhout and his colleagues wrote.
Latitude is one factor but not the sole factor, proximity to oceans/seas for example matters as well as it has a moderating influence in both dimensions - not a coincidence that the coldest states in the continental US are all northern and in the center of the landmass.
Other factors are things like prevailing winds, mountain ranges, altitude and so on and on - the climate system is one of the most complex systems on the planet and even with decades of heavy study and insanely fast computers we still struggle to predict it accurately out past a week or two at most with any degree of success.
I always thought it was funny that the north of the US becomes as snow paradise in the winter, while most of Germany, which is at Canada level, just becomes a bit colder version of autumn at that time.
A map that also shows the difference between winter and summer for day length would be great. It is down right quaint hearing people bitch about the hour of change that DST does compared to the near 6 hours that nature has already taken. (Note, this doesn't require contextualizing to across the ocean.)
Similarly, for storms and such, knowing just how different the east coast of the US is compared to many of the places that people came from is amusing. What I thought of as normal rain is evidently comparable to the gods wanting to kill you. Always amusing when people ask, "doesn't it rain a lot in Seattle" for me. I don't know that I would have called what we get rain.
I mind DST because I have to consider clock changes, not because I care how many hours of sunlight are in the period between 6h and 18h. Even the extreme of Arctic winter is annoying only because 4h looking similar to 16h messes with your awareness of time until you adopt a structured schedule.
And that was largely a fair point back before we had everything managed by computers. Nowadays, I'd wager the vast majority of folks didn't realize their phone's changed overnight. My kids certainly didn't realize it.
Not that I don't think we couldn't have a better system. But nobody likes my idea of "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down." Well... I think some folks like the idea, but nobody (including me) thinks that is where we are headed.
> "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down."
Back before Japan adopted our current time system, they adjusted their clocks every two weeks. They adjusted the "hour" markers so that there were always six temporal hours of daylight and six of darkness, with the time period of the hours changing.
Thats really cool, I'll have to dig into knowing why they did that and why they stopped. My gut is that the way we do DST -- by moving what timezone everyone is in -- is just not compatible with that sort of system.
I pushed for the idea as it is by far more closely aligned with solar time than what we have. That is, sun dials did this somewhat automatically for many years, no? (They, of course, also stretch how long an hour is... I am not that sadistic)
My country (Italy) could simply leave DST on all year long and it will be better suited to our way of living. Spain basically did it for the last 90 years when they moved to the timezone of GMT+1 from GMT+0 where they belong. As a bonus they got DST in the summer. After all I could get a double DST in the summer too. All that light at 5 AM is wasted.
This is part of what I find "quaint" about the conversation. I think there is basically no argument that many states and nations could just stick to a single timezone. Essentially, the closer to the equator you are, the less you are impacted by daylight changing.
So, calling it "quaint" is wrong. But a lot of talking past each other. The shift in daylight is much more dramatic for people further from the equator.
Right, and that I think is far easier to deal with than you realize. Easier if you don't try it in 1 hour jumps twice a year. But basically every animal already has to deal with the shift due to the nature of actual sunlight. And we do just fine by that.
(I should add that I have also never used an alarm clock. The shift from DST has never really been difficult to manage. Only was hard when I would be awake, but not leave for work/school on time because I forgot to update the clock.)
What time will X occur on a particular future date? E.g. meetings.
What time will X occur in another time zone?
What time will X occur across multiple time zones that shift at different times?
What time will X occur across multiple time zones where one doesn't shift at all? E.g. meetings with people in Arizona.
How long ago did X occur, across a transition? E.g. correlating Unix time to civil time.
How long is X, where X is an event spanning multiple time zones that shift independently? E.g. plane flights.
Does my cron job need to run intermittently every X hours, or at 24/X particular times every day, or every X hours but managed so that processing doesn't intrude into normal business hours?
Personally, when I'm in the wilderness my circadian rhythm follows the sun. Up at sunrise and asleep not long after sunset. That's not how I work when I'm living in society, so I don't see why animal adaptations are particularly relevant here.
On a social level, the shift causes tremendous levels of stress to people. It essentially creates a day of national jet lag, for no real benefit that I can see.
None of those are difficult in the modern world. Computers have pretty much solved all of them. There are confusing to talk about cases. But none that are truly problematic.
Consider some of the most sensitive for people. Take your medication twice a day. What do people do when they fly across the country? Most don't keep the same schedule they had back home on the medication. They just start doing it at the new place.
Folks that do have "take this exactly every 12 hours" rely on a timer, not a clock.
Even talking about how long ago something was is just not that important for folks in most scenarios. Consider, when people move they don't change their birth date if it would have been a different day in the new location. (That is, nobody does their birthday by GMT.)
Now, about the only idea I fully reject is that we could just tell all businesses to change their opening hours so that we don't have to change the clocks. This is mind numbingly crazy to me. The entire point of changing the clocks is to get everyone to update together.
When a meeting is set up and time shifts happen, in practice people don't know what time the meeting is. Same for the rest. I'm not concerned about whether you can calculate it in theory (you actually can't in general, just the common cases) since it doesn't happen reliably in my experience. There were also many cases of things incorrectly applying DST when I lived in AZ.
Also, I assure you people care very much about how long ago they worked when it involves their paychecks and hours worked. Datetime/DST bugs in payment systems and other critical computers are scarily common.
Plus the billions in social costs. Children have to dream with sleep deprivation, hospitals have to treat more strokes, pollution worsens, and criminals get longer sentences.
I'm not sure why changing opening hours is difficult. It's incredibly common to have off-season and high season hours in tourist towns. You don't have to coordinate anything. If the idea of multiple hours is too difficult for anyone, they can simply pick one or the other. Nothing bad will happen.
The benefits we get for the trouble of changing the clocks are minor.
If you are saying that mistakes will be made, I agree. People make mistakes all of the time. About things easier than schedules.
If you want to single out the idea of "shifting timezones" being how we accomplish DST. I agree that is problematic, at best. I can assume there were reasons to do it by completely changing what timezone an area is in. I struggle to understand them, myself. Especially when we don't do the same for other time shifts. (Leap years and seconds, in particular.)
I further agree that doing it in one hour jump is bad. Is literally why I suggest shortening the jump to 10 minutes would be fine. Argument being that that is far more natural for how time was felt by people for most of history. (Indeed, originally, hours were not fixed in terms of how many minutes they took.)
But no, nobody cares what time you said they clocked in yesterday. They care that you accurately pay them for how long they were clocked in for. Obviously, you have to make any system that deals with those work correctly. But, again, people make mistakes on those already, irrespective of timezone changes.
For evidence, see how little energy people expend on how incomprehensible airline tickets are. Look at a ticket and see if you can quickly say how long a flight is. It isn't like they don't know. It just doesn't matter on your ticket. (Even if I like to consider my options based on how long I'll be in the air...)
Is it a good argument to not necessarily change things? Yeah, which is why I think my suggestion of 10 minute changes is largely silly. A lot of inertia in the system we have is not necessarily a bad thing.
Getting everyone to change their operating hours just feels daft to me. And, ultimately, how is that any different?
For example, you want to get it so that schools start/end an hour earlier starting a week. Which means that we still have to deal with the idea that you have to shift your sleep. Probably wise to also go to sleep an hour earlier. And, yeah, I think people could adjust to knowing that they have to change their bedtime from 9 to 8, for example. But, there is a reason we try to keep sunrise and sunset as close to consistent times as we can. No matter where we go.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the data about how much worse the week of the hour loss is. I'd be curious to know if that is better or worse in recent years. And I genuinely don't know how to square the fact that the data dang near cancels out with how much better it is in the week we gain an hour. That, honestly, feels a bit too convenient. (And again, this just gets me back to the idea that the problem is losing a full hour.)
Most of the eastern US gets more inches of precipitation than Seattle. But there are few places (mostly in a band from eastern Ohio and West Virginia, across Upstate New York, through to northern New England) that have more days with measurable precipitation than Seattle.
Someone also pulled data on the fifty largest cities: https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-n.... Seattle is 32nd for amount of rain but 5th (behind Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the band I mentioned, and also its neighbor Portland) for number of rainy days.
I think that is basically the map I was asking for, so kudos on that. I still think it fails to capture what it means to be a rainy day. Is about like when Seattle has a snow day. If you are from a place that actually gets snow, you'd scoff at us calling it a snow storm.
I think my favorite is the few times it thunders. People would all move to windows in a sort of awe at the loud noise.
I really missed the good, intense thunderstorms of the US southeast when I lived in Seattle. Seattle gets a good misting from time to time, but I almost never bothered with rain gear or an umbrella while living there.
Exactly. It really makes the discussions around how loud fireworks are kind of hard to listen to. It isn't that they are wrong. More that it was a regular thing for storms to shake the house. Our dogs were terrified of "what the F is happening out there." On the regular.
It would also be interesting to see a version corrected for the warmer temperatures due to Atlantic currents. Although that might cause some sort of near-Atlantic or near-Mediterranean "skew" in the map rather than the whole map dropping or raising by some amount, but maybe adjusting the whole map could be a reasonable first approximation.
The issue is that as solar panels become cheaper than dirt, we will find ways to use them which are not "base load" things. Maybe we in the future will factor in the annual Solar Harvest into our energy plans.
>we will find ways to use them which are not "base load" things
If you build solar for much of base load there for those clouded winter weeks where you won't even hope to reach the average winter output then i'm curious what those applications will be that'll fit the model of capitalism.
Are you gonna overbuild 20fold with matching grid (not talking about that north-south connection that Germany can't seem to manage) and have metalurgy industries that will only run in summer?
Or are you going to build/maintain gas plants at a fraction of the cost even if solar panels end up dirt cheap for those weeks where people still want to run their industries and heatpumps and continue to add to the problem.
Looking at my own gov and what i expect from the german one I think I know the answers.
Until that happens, I think we should assume that solar only isn't a viable option. At the moment Finland would need 60x more solar to cover current needs (during daytime), and it's barely winter yet. Sure, you'd get away with 20x in Germany but remember we _all_ need to scale up for actual winters where you can't just say "whoops" if things don't go to plan.
Interesting. The city replacements are cool. What's the point though? Climate doesn't exactly align with latitude, and has other factors. Lifestyle, food, culture would also not depend on latitude.
I travelled from Sydney to Cape Town a while back. Both cities are roughly on the same latitude, and it shows.
The climate was similar, temperatures were similar, even the type of vegetation that showed up were similar. Trekking through South African veldt felt much the same as walking through Australian bush
I had the same feeling when I lived in Porto and later visited San Francisco. The two cities have so much in common: similar temperatures, they're both famous for their bridges (Porto actually has several), the fog that rolls in regularly, and even their most iconic bodies of water both have "gold" in the name: the Golden Gate and Rio Douro (which means "golden river"). I think this comes from how the water looks golden at sunset, since both coastlines face west. And of course, both cities are known for their cable cars.
Shout out to the gulf stream for keeping Ireland's climate significantly more temperate than our Canadian latitude neighbours. As kids when we looked out to sea on the west coast we thought next stop was New York, but it's more like Newfoundland. If (when?) the gulf stream gets significantly disrupted it's gonna be a major shock
> Shout out to the gulf stream for keeping Ireland's climate significantly more temperate than our Canadian latitude neighbours.
Here is research that argues to the contrary: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-source-of-euro...
Interesting. Is there other research on this? How well tested is the mode?
It is something i have wondered about because proximity to the heat in the sea is clearly an important factor too, so i am interested. Surely the Gulf Stream must have some impact?
The article doesn’t say that the ocean is irrelevant just that it’s not the oceanic currents that dominate. The main thing is just having an ocean at all coupled with prevailing winds being west to east. Hence Seattle, which is mild but does not benefit from Gulf Stream like currents
Yes, I get that. To clarify I meant proximity to heat in the sea "stored" from warmer times of the year without the effect of the Gulf Stream is clearly an important factor.
Fortunately, Ireland’s woefully inadequate climate policies may help give us a chance to study the phenomenon of AMOC collapse within our lifetimes!
Ireland's climate policies, whether adequate or inadequate, can have very little affect on the evolution of the AMOC, or any other large-scale climactic phenomenon. There are vastly more influential factors at play all around the world.
Inasmuch as it’s a country of five million people you are right in absolute terms, but considering the government’s shocked Pikachu face reaction to being held to the terms of an agreement Ireland signed up to it’s still a bit galling.
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1027/15406...
Ireland “has the largest emissions per person in the EU for the sectors covered by the regulation.”
And we are not even building enough housing as it is, imagine if we were...
One of the best things Ireland could do is build lots of housing close to job centres so people don’t have to drive so far to work, or ideally can take public transport (or bike or walk)
It’s remarkable seeing people commute to Dublin from tullamore or even athlone.
Relying less on concrete would help too, wood construction seems to be getting more common at least.
For peat's sake!
It's not indeed more at risk than previously thought - https://www.politico.eu/article/gulf-stream-could-collapse-l...
TL;DR:
I had an accidental "not" in my comment (and edit window closed). Yep, that's indeed the message.
The US is a lot more down south than I thought. That somewhat explains you guys' love of air conditioning...
I don't know how valid a climate comparison based purely on latitude is though... Surely Egypt is generally warmer than Florida?
Latitude is one factor but not the sole factor, proximity to oceans/seas for example matters as well as it has a moderating influence in both dimensions - not a coincidence that the coldest states in the continental US are all northern and in the center of the landmass.
Other factors are things like prevailing winds, mountain ranges, altitude and so on and on - the climate system is one of the most complex systems on the planet and even with decades of heavy study and insanely fast computers we still struggle to predict it accurately out past a week or two at most with any degree of success.
We struggle to predict the weather, not the climate.
In fairness, we struggle to predict both.
Yup. And Toronto in Canada is closer to the equator than to the north Pole.
Scrollable map of the whole world:
https://www.bytemuse.com/post/interactive-equivalent-latitud...
"Horrible Winters here in Wyoming".
Checking the map -- same latitude as Rome.
"Ok son. Close the window."
And that's why with a bit of ingenuity you can grow plants year round in Maine as it has the same day length as northern Italy
https://youtu.be/Xm6khNRIGhE?t=334
I always thought it was funny that the north of the US becomes as snow paradise in the winter, while most of Germany, which is at Canada level, just becomes a bit colder version of autumn at that time.
No worries, we'll get the snow back in Germany soon..
A map that also shows the difference between winter and summer for day length would be great. It is down right quaint hearing people bitch about the hour of change that DST does compared to the near 6 hours that nature has already taken. (Note, this doesn't require contextualizing to across the ocean.)
Similarly, for storms and such, knowing just how different the east coast of the US is compared to many of the places that people came from is amusing. What I thought of as normal rain is evidently comparable to the gods wanting to kill you. Always amusing when people ask, "doesn't it rain a lot in Seattle" for me. I don't know that I would have called what we get rain.
I mind DST because I have to consider clock changes, not because I care how many hours of sunlight are in the period between 6h and 18h. Even the extreme of Arctic winter is annoying only because 4h looking similar to 16h messes with your awareness of time until you adopt a structured schedule.
And that was largely a fair point back before we had everything managed by computers. Nowadays, I'd wager the vast majority of folks didn't realize their phone's changed overnight. My kids certainly didn't realize it.
Not that I don't think we couldn't have a better system. But nobody likes my idea of "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down." Well... I think some folks like the idea, but nobody (including me) thinks that is where we are headed.
> "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down."
Back before Japan adopted our current time system, they adjusted their clocks every two weeks. They adjusted the "hour" markers so that there were always six temporal hours of daylight and six of darkness, with the time period of the hours changing.
Thats really cool, I'll have to dig into knowing why they did that and why they stopped. My gut is that the way we do DST -- by moving what timezone everyone is in -- is just not compatible with that sort of system.
I pushed for the idea as it is by far more closely aligned with solar time than what we have. That is, sun dials did this somewhat automatically for many years, no? (They, of course, also stretch how long an hour is... I am not that sadistic)
My country (Italy) could simply leave DST on all year long and it will be better suited to our way of living. Spain basically did it for the last 90 years when they moved to the timezone of GMT+1 from GMT+0 where they belong. As a bonus they got DST in the summer. After all I could get a double DST in the summer too. All that light at 5 AM is wasted.
This is part of what I find "quaint" about the conversation. I think there is basically no argument that many states and nations could just stick to a single timezone. Essentially, the closer to the equator you are, the less you are impacted by daylight changing.
So, calling it "quaint" is wrong. But a lot of talking past each other. The shift in daylight is much more dramatic for people further from the equator.
I don't know about the poster before me, but it is not so much about actual clocks changing but about the biological clock changing.
Right, and that I think is far easier to deal with than you realize. Easier if you don't try it in 1 hour jumps twice a year. But basically every animal already has to deal with the shift due to the nature of actual sunlight. And we do just fine by that.
(I should add that I have also never used an alarm clock. The shift from DST has never really been difficult to manage. Only was hard when I would be awake, but not leave for work/school on time because I forgot to update the clock.)
What time will X occur on a particular future date? E.g. meetings.
What time will X occur in another time zone?
What time will X occur across multiple time zones that shift at different times?
What time will X occur across multiple time zones where one doesn't shift at all? E.g. meetings with people in Arizona.
How long ago did X occur, across a transition? E.g. correlating Unix time to civil time.
How long is X, where X is an event spanning multiple time zones that shift independently? E.g. plane flights.
Does my cron job need to run intermittently every X hours, or at 24/X particular times every day, or every X hours but managed so that processing doesn't intrude into normal business hours?
Personally, when I'm in the wilderness my circadian rhythm follows the sun. Up at sunrise and asleep not long after sunset. That's not how I work when I'm living in society, so I don't see why animal adaptations are particularly relevant here.
On a social level, the shift causes tremendous levels of stress to people. It essentially creates a day of national jet lag, for no real benefit that I can see.
None of those are difficult in the modern world. Computers have pretty much solved all of them. There are confusing to talk about cases. But none that are truly problematic.
Consider some of the most sensitive for people. Take your medication twice a day. What do people do when they fly across the country? Most don't keep the same schedule they had back home on the medication. They just start doing it at the new place.
Folks that do have "take this exactly every 12 hours" rely on a timer, not a clock.
Even talking about how long ago something was is just not that important for folks in most scenarios. Consider, when people move they don't change their birth date if it would have been a different day in the new location. (That is, nobody does their birthday by GMT.)
Now, about the only idea I fully reject is that we could just tell all businesses to change their opening hours so that we don't have to change the clocks. This is mind numbingly crazy to me. The entire point of changing the clocks is to get everyone to update together.
When a meeting is set up and time shifts happen, in practice people don't know what time the meeting is. Same for the rest. I'm not concerned about whether you can calculate it in theory (you actually can't in general, just the common cases) since it doesn't happen reliably in my experience. There were also many cases of things incorrectly applying DST when I lived in AZ.
Also, I assure you people care very much about how long ago they worked when it involves their paychecks and hours worked. Datetime/DST bugs in payment systems and other critical computers are scarily common.
Plus the billions in social costs. Children have to dream with sleep deprivation, hospitals have to treat more strokes, pollution worsens, and criminals get longer sentences.
I'm not sure why changing opening hours is difficult. It's incredibly common to have off-season and high season hours in tourist towns. You don't have to coordinate anything. If the idea of multiple hours is too difficult for anyone, they can simply pick one or the other. Nothing bad will happen.
The benefits we get for the trouble of changing the clocks are minor.
If you are saying that mistakes will be made, I agree. People make mistakes all of the time. About things easier than schedules.
If you want to single out the idea of "shifting timezones" being how we accomplish DST. I agree that is problematic, at best. I can assume there were reasons to do it by completely changing what timezone an area is in. I struggle to understand them, myself. Especially when we don't do the same for other time shifts. (Leap years and seconds, in particular.)
I further agree that doing it in one hour jump is bad. Is literally why I suggest shortening the jump to 10 minutes would be fine. Argument being that that is far more natural for how time was felt by people for most of history. (Indeed, originally, hours were not fixed in terms of how many minutes they took.)
But no, nobody cares what time you said they clocked in yesterday. They care that you accurately pay them for how long they were clocked in for. Obviously, you have to make any system that deals with those work correctly. But, again, people make mistakes on those already, irrespective of timezone changes.
For evidence, see how little energy people expend on how incomprehensible airline tickets are. Look at a ticket and see if you can quickly say how long a flight is. It isn't like they don't know. It just doesn't matter on your ticket. (Even if I like to consider my options based on how long I'll be in the air...)
Is it a good argument to not necessarily change things? Yeah, which is why I think my suggestion of 10 minute changes is largely silly. A lot of inertia in the system we have is not necessarily a bad thing.
Getting everyone to change their operating hours just feels daft to me. And, ultimately, how is that any different?
For example, you want to get it so that schools start/end an hour earlier starting a week. Which means that we still have to deal with the idea that you have to shift your sleep. Probably wise to also go to sleep an hour earlier. And, yeah, I think people could adjust to knowing that they have to change their bedtime from 9 to 8, for example. But, there is a reason we try to keep sunrise and sunset as close to consistent times as we can. No matter where we go.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the data about how much worse the week of the hour loss is. I'd be curious to know if that is better or worse in recent years. And I genuinely don't know how to square the fact that the data dang near cancels out with how much better it is in the week we gain an hour. That, honestly, feels a bit too convenient. (And again, this just gets me back to the idea that the problem is losing a full hour.)
See the maps here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simp...
Most of the eastern US gets more inches of precipitation than Seattle. But there are few places (mostly in a band from eastern Ohio and West Virginia, across Upstate New York, through to northern New England) that have more days with measurable precipitation than Seattle.
Someone also pulled data on the fifty largest cities: https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-n.... Seattle is 32nd for amount of rain but 5th (behind Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the band I mentioned, and also its neighbor Portland) for number of rainy days.
I think that is basically the map I was asking for, so kudos on that. I still think it fails to capture what it means to be a rainy day. Is about like when Seattle has a snow day. If you are from a place that actually gets snow, you'd scoff at us calling it a snow storm.
I think my favorite is the few times it thunders. People would all move to windows in a sort of awe at the loud noise.
Yeah, you want some threshold for amount of rain that's higher than "measurable precipitation".
I really missed the good, intense thunderstorms of the US southeast when I lived in Seattle. Seattle gets a good misting from time to time, but I almost never bothered with rain gear or an umbrella while living there.
Exactly. It really makes the discussions around how loud fireworks are kind of hard to listen to. It isn't that they are wrong. More that it was a regular thing for storms to shake the house. Our dogs were terrified of "what the F is happening out there." On the regular.
It would also be interesting to see a version corrected for the warmer temperatures due to Atlantic currents. Although that might cause some sort of near-Atlantic or near-Mediterranean "skew" in the map rather than the whole map dropping or raising by some amount, but maybe adjusting the whole map could be a reasonable first approximation.
The Falkland-Malvinas islands are at the same latitude of the UK and have a climate similar to Scotland.
Neat overlay but a missed opportunity to include actual lines of latitude.
A beautiful illustration of why solar power is a no-brainer for California or Arizona, but is a doubtful proposition for Germany.
Solar power is not a doubtful proposition for Germany [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
You need a Solar Radiance map to say thay. Latitude is a factor, but so is climate.
Here's an example: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/
California and Arizona are comparable to Sahara, but Germany has much usable potential too.
The issue is that in winter in the likes of berlin when the need for power is highest you might as well not have them.
The issue is that as solar panels become cheaper than dirt, we will find ways to use them which are not "base load" things. Maybe we in the future will factor in the annual Solar Harvest into our energy plans.
>we will find ways to use them which are not "base load" things
If you build solar for much of base load there for those clouded winter weeks where you won't even hope to reach the average winter output then i'm curious what those applications will be that'll fit the model of capitalism.
Are you gonna overbuild 20fold with matching grid (not talking about that north-south connection that Germany can't seem to manage) and have metalurgy industries that will only run in summer?
Or are you going to build/maintain gas plants at a fraction of the cost even if solar panels end up dirt cheap for those weeks where people still want to run their industries and heatpumps and continue to add to the problem.
Looking at my own gov and what i expect from the german one I think I know the answers.
I don't know - I believe panels will be dirt cheap and I wonder what will happen. Something interesting will happen, economy abhors a vacuum.
Until that happens, I think we should assume that solar only isn't a viable option. At the moment Finland would need 60x more solar to cover current needs (during daytime), and it's barely winter yet. Sure, you'd get away with 20x in Germany but remember we _all_ need to scale up for actual winters where you can't just say "whoops" if things don't go to plan.
I've always wondered what type of volume will be needed world-wide in landfills to house all the discarded solar panels.
Probably less than all the fly-ash from coal.
Storage exists, and will continue to get cheaper.
The storage that's getting cheaper that you're talking about isn't seasonal.
Domestic solar is huge in Germany
Interesting. The city replacements are cool. What's the point though? Climate doesn't exactly align with latitude, and has other factors. Lifestyle, food, culture would also not depend on latitude.
> Climate doesn't exactly align with latitude, and has other factors.
I think that's what makes this interesting. For many people it does and this challenges that assumption.
I travelled from Sydney to Cape Town a while back. Both cities are roughly on the same latitude, and it shows.
The climate was similar, temperatures were similar, even the type of vegetation that showed up were similar. Trekking through South African veldt felt much the same as walking through Australian bush
I had the same feeling when I lived in Porto and later visited San Francisco. The two cities have so much in common: similar temperatures, they're both famous for their bridges (Porto actually has several), the fog that rolls in regularly, and even their most iconic bodies of water both have "gold" in the name: the Golden Gate and Rio Douro (which means "golden river"). I think this comes from how the water looks golden at sunset, since both coastlines face west. And of course, both cities are known for their cable cars.
(2015)
Just curious...what's the point of pointing out the year? Typically that's done to emphasize out of date content.
Would you expect a map of comparative latitudes to significantly change in a decade?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45716365
Ah ok. That’s uh…a quite the obscure custom but alrighty then!