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China's CO2 Emissions Have Been Flat Or Falling For Past 18 Months, Analysis Finds

Slashdot
1 month 4 weeks ago
China's CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for 18 months, "adding evidence to the hope that the world's biggest polluter has managed to hit its target of peak CO2 emissions well ahead of schedule," reports the Guardian. From the report: Rapid increases in the deployment of solar and wind power generation -- which grew by 46% and 11% respectively in the third quarter of this year -- meant the country's energy sector emissions remained flat, even as the demand for electricity increased. China added 240GW of solar capacity in the first nine months of this year, and 61GW of wind, putting it on track for another renewable record in 2025. Last year, the country installed 333GW of solar power, more than the rest of the world combined. [...] The analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea), for the science and climate policy website Carbon Brief, found China's CO2 emissions were unchanged from a year earlier in the third quarter of 2025, thanks in part to declining emissions in the travel, cement and steel industries. But China has a record of underpromising and overdelivering on climate targets. Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a US-based thinktank, said in a recent note that the latest Chinese climate targets should be seen as a baseline and not a ceiling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BeauHD

CodeSOD: Losing a Digit

The Daily WTF
1 month 4 weeks ago

Alicia recently moved to a new country and took a job with a small company willing to pay well and help with relocation costs. Overall, the code base was pretty solid. Despite the overall strong code base, one recurring complaint was that running the test suite was painfully long.

While Alicia doesn't specify what the core business is, but says: "in this company's core business, random numbers were the base of everything."

As such, they did take generating random numbers fairly seriously, and mostly used strong tools for doing that. However, whoever wrote their test suite was maybe a bit less concerned, and wrote this function:

public static Long generateRandomNumberOf(int length) { while (true) { long numb = (long)(Math.random() * 100000000 * 1000000); // had to use this as int's are to small for a 13 digit number. if (String.valueOf(numb).length() == length) return numb; } }

They want many digits of random number. So they generate a random floating point, and then multiply it a few times to get a large number. If the length of the resulting number, in characters, is the desired length, we return it. Otherwise, we try again.

The joy here, of course, is that this function is never guaranteed to exit. In fact, if you request more than 15 digits, it definitely won't exit. In practice, most of the time, the function is able to hit the target length in a relative handful of iterations, but there's no guarantee for that.

Alicia was tracking down a bug in a test which called this function. So she went ahead and fixed this function so that it use a sane way to generate the appropriate amount of entropy that actually guaranteed a result. She included that change in her pull request, nobody had any comments, and it got merged in.

The unit tests aren't vastly faster than they were, but they are faster. Who knows what other surprises the test suite has in store?

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Remy Porter