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Comment by petecox | Hacker News Reader

> Southern Hemisphere" is an irrelevant non-interesting click-baity qualifier here.

Sigh. Not everyone is blessed to be have been born in the southern hemisphere, it seems.

As a resident of the big island to NZ's west, it is welcome news, particularly juxtaposed with my own government's lagging response to climate change, in a pacific region with many low lying island nations.

Having personally caught ferries in Australia and Chile, as well as between the border of Argentina and Uruguay, I reflect then on how each nation's carbon footprint could be reduced by adopting such technology.

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But why? Do you feel you have more in common with Mozambique and Argentina than you do with England and the US because of your location?

I've never been to Moçambique but absolutely I felt a bond with people over the other side of the Pacific in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Similar post-colonial perspective on the world, similar emigration stories (e.g. strong Italian cultures in both Buenos Aires and Melbourne, German migration to Adelaide and Valdivia), similar latitude producing great "new world" wine, and we celebrate Christmas in summer.

Of course there's the language but my attachment to England ended 160 years ago and my only visit to the US I found strangely alien, feeling more at home across the border in Canada.

Maybe not Mozambique but we do have a lot in common with South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Argentina. We all play the same sports for instance.

But the southern hemisphere is isolated and was largely late to be colonised, it's also half the planet.

“The Southern hemisphere represents around 800,000,000 people. This hemisphere represents only 10-12% of the total global population of 6.88 billion people.”

“Land areas are distributed predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere (68%) relative to the Southern Hemisphere (32%) as divided by the equator.”

Exactly, we're a bunch of sparsely populated and isolated countries. That's why we talk about North and South being different.

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