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[-] shani66@ani.social 0 points 1 week ago

Iirc sailing ships are faster than modern ships in ideal conditions, considering we have the means to plan around those conditions you'd think we'd use sails more often.

Sailing ships are considerably slower than engine driven ships, especially given they usually have to sail way the hell out of their way to chase prevailing winds.

Modern cargo vessels have to be able to do things like pass under bridges over harbor mouths that large rigging couldn't easily do, and most require fairly clear access to the decks for cargo loading/unloading, particularly intermodal shipping containers.

You do see a strange kind of "sail" called a Flettner rotor being used on occasion, which is a fairly easy system to bolt onto a modern cargo ship, it can be raised and lowered without much of a problem, and it can improve fuel efficiency by harnessing wind.

this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
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Climate

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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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