Recommendation 1: Primum non nocere. How do you know whether you are doing harm or not? You have to study. You have to study multiple sides, bearing in mind at all times that you may be wrong, they may be wrong, and their facts may be fictions, and so may yours. I have collected and read over 8000 pages of papers on climate, and as a result, I am not impressed by the climate strikes. In my country, the government already devoutly believes in climate change. We have an actual Minister for Climate Change. In my city, most of the candidates for the upcoming local body election proclaim their belief that Something Needs to be Done, and I will be very impressed if any of them actually has an idea. The climate strikes will certainly achieve nothing *here*, and let's face it, unless and until you get the Big Two (China and India) to do something, the climate strikes will be ineffective posturing that accomplish nothing for the world as a whole. Recommendation 2: In this mailing list, you're talking to people who love programming. There are some exceedingly impressive people here. Those of us with computing skills who are sincere in their fear of climate change and equally sincere in their desire to do something constructive should, well, do something constructive. Here I point to the people who keep on making Haskell a better and better language for parallel programming, making Haskell a serious candidate for at least supporting supercomputing. As one specific example, the supercomputing project I was involved with, until my government decided to pull out, was seriously planning to do a major component of the system software in Python. Python has many virtues, but it would be nice to use a language in which mistakes are more quickly detected. I also point to the people who were making Haskell a usable DSL for GPU crunching. We *desperately* need good tools for supercomputing. I should point to clash-lang.org here too. I would suggest that by making it easier for people to move demanding computations to FPGAs and thereby reduce the amount of electrical power needed, any one Clash person has done more for the planet than any hundred climate strikers. Did I mention that I have three Global Circulation Models on this machine? Of course they have serious problems matching the behaviour of the actual planet. But is that because they have the physics wrong (I was at a talk by a physicist who believed he had found why the Antarctic is gaining ice, contrary to predictions, for example) or because the code is wrong? Let me put it this way: climate modelling code tends to be written by physicists, not by software engineers. They are extremely intelligent people, but they have a higher tolerance for unbeautiful code than I do. I gave a talk earlier this year "Why HPC needs SE" and I was able to find more horrid examples (not all from GCMs, but some of them were) than I had time for. Are you on this mailing list and wanting to do something real about climate change? Then try to get your skills used to improve the craft of supercomputing and climate modelling. Alternatively, there will be a lot of work needed on climate monitoring. Try to get your skills used to improve climate monitoring. I spent a couple of weeks earlier this year helping to write a grant proposal for a precision agriculture/climate monitoring project. We got through round 1; I'll hear about round 2 at the end of the month. THAT will help with the environment whatever the climate does. Recommendation 3: Put climate change activities on things like Change.Org and SumOfUs. (Both of which send me stuff.) That is a much more effective way to reach an audience. On Fri, 20 Sep 2019 at 06:06, Simon Michael <simon@joyful.com> wrote:

Hi all,

There's world-wide "strike" event, to raise awareness and stimulate climate action, happening tomorrow and also on friday 27th. Some folks will observe one, the other, both, or the whole period between.

We probably don't all share the same awareness or even concern about climate change.. but this is changing rapidly. I wanted to start a discussion and figure out something we could do to support these events.. earlier. But I'm working, preparing for a trip, etc. etc. and "ran out of time". I'll send this now at least. If the site goes green or something, this is the reason.

Re the sep 20 and sep 27 events:

Thanks to Open Collective, for their leadership and blog post: https://blog.opencollective.com/digital-climate-strike

hledger's opencollective, though we're not really using it yet, is opted in for tomorrow: https://opencollective.com/hledger

Origin and recent history of this event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_strike_for_climate#'Intergenerational'_Global_Climate_Strikes_in_September_2019

There are probably a bunch of "home" sites for this, here are two: https://www.fridaysforfuture.org https://www.earth-strike.com

Going forward:

I think "How are we helping?" is a standard question every individual, project, institution should be answering.

For the hledger project, I've had a few ideas for a long time but haven't managed to manifest them yet. Looking into the near future, some days it feels like working on hledger is a waste of time. Probably many of you can relate.

If you are working on anything in this direction I'd love to hear more.

Best! -Simon

PS I ran out of time even more for crafting a mail to haskell-cafe; cc'ing this anyway. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.