More efficiency, less regulation (the already own the canals), less evaporation - it's things like this that show there's really a tremendous amount of low-hanging fruit to do things far better than we currently do. If people would stop the doom and gloom + political infighting and focused more on this type of problem solving we could really make some progress.

This would be interesting to analyze in depth, but intuitively I'm wondering if the effect will be quite small. I would imagine that whatever humidity is contributed by this evaporation is completely dwarfed by what's happening over the ocean, for starters. Secondly, preventing evaporation from the canal doesn't mean the water never evaporates - much of it still does, it just might do it when it is sprayed over a lawn, or transpired out of leaves, or flooded over a field. Even if it's soaked into groundwater supplies, that will likely be released when things dry out and tree roots pull up the water from deep in the earth. So you're generally adjusting the time and location of evaporation, but not necessarily the total amount.

There will certainly be impacts to microclimates near the canal though - I would expect temperatures in the immediate vicinity of the canals to rise since they will no longer enjoy the cooling effect of all that evaporation.

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Strawman argument my friend - nobody is making the claim that you're arguing against. You'll note that scientific studies (including this one) never purport to have 100% truth. Responsible scientists (like these guys) add qualifiers to the extent that most laymen get annoyed by it. "Study suggests" that things "could be vulnerable" at a "x% confidence interval" and +- some amount of uncertainty.

You said that the authors are "flat out making up numbers of things" - which isn't at all true, and misrepresents the statistically rigorous methods used in this study. Your characterization is what I object to - the statistics are sound, and so there's no reason to disbelieve the conclusions of the study.

Is it this line you are complaining about? "... a third of undiscovered tree species are rare, meaning they could be vulnerable to extinction by human-driven changes in land use and the climate crisis".

If so, again, your criticism seems groundless. If extinction is a problem among known species, it stands to reason that it is potentially a bigger problem among undiscovered species, which are presumably less robust and numerous and than known species. Overall, the study uses a clever technique to place some bounds on one of the important unknown factors in ecology, and just states the obvious implications for any of the species in question.

You're applying a value judgement to this shit all on your own. The concept that there are many undiscovered species isn't new... do you really think we've already discovered all there is to discover? Using basic math to estimate exactly what that number might be should also be uncontroversial, and the value of that ought to be quite obvious to anybody who thinks about it for a moment.

A lot of people right now seem to be committed to magical thinking - if we don't know about a problem, then it can't hurt us. If a scientist tells us about a problem, shoot the messenger - they are raining on our positivity parade. And I get it, it's fucking awful to confront the fact that we might be living through (and the cause of) the worst global extinction event in millions of years. But pretending that isn't true doesn't help anything.

Trying to actually understand the world, like this scientist is doing, does help things, though. It makes us more informed and better equipped to actually do better.

Not even close. These guys are using well-proven statistical methods (Good-Turing frequency estimation, specifically) to sample the existing population, observing how often they find each species, and using some pretty basic math to project the likelihood of observing new species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Believe it or not, you can learn a lot about a population by collecting a small sample - this is the basis for many data collection and engineering methods. "Some guy thinks there are 14k undiscovered species" isn't news - "Scientist uses proven statistical modeling and robust data collection to estimate undiscovered species" is.

Maybe try, for just a moment, to shut down your reactionary political impulses long enough to understand a bit of the science before you criticize it. Maybe it's possible that this scientist knows what he's doing? And that it makes plenty of sense if you give it more than a cursory moment of thought? Crazy idea, I know.

Ah, well I do in fact have a Honda with that engine (J35A8), so the cost for replacing one is something I've recently dealt with. ;)

Not sure if you're anti-EV or anti-Tesla, but high performance EVs are new technology, and Tesla was the first to crack the code (obvious in hindsight) of pricing things high for early adopters, and then moving systematically towards cheaper, higher-volume products.

Still, the fuel savings, and as important, maintenance savings, are quite immense. EVs are commonly achieving 100k miles or more on that original battery pack, and for a fair comparison, you need to count all the scheduled maintenance that is going to be required for an ICEV for systems that just don't exist in an EV. At 100k, you've got $10k for fuel costs, assuming a car that gets 30MPG and you pay $3 a gallon. A $50 oil change every 5000 miles is another $1k. Spark plugs, air filters, fuel filters, transmission flushes, coolant flushes will easily add up to another $1k. For most vehicles, you'll have a timing belt scheduled around 75k-90k, which will run you $1k. So right there, we're at $13k with a very rough estimate, and remember, those are *guaranteed expenses* that an ICEV will incur just for maintaining the vehicle properly, without accounting for anything breaking.

Shocks, 12V batteries, tires, cabin air filters exist for both vehicles so don't need to be part of the analysis. At the end of the day, even a fuel-efficient ICEV is going to cost you $10k-15k more in operating costs over 100,000 miles, assuming you don't have any major work that needs doing.

So right now, in the latter early adopter phase, while they are still priced as mid-range to high-end vehicles, EVs are economically competitive. Give it 5 years, and they are going to have comparable purchase prices and far lower depreciation and operating costs. 10 years from now, it will be financially wasteful to get anything except an EV, and the infrastructure will have matured so much that you can just charge whenever you go shopping once a week, and so it will become convenient even for people who don't have charging at home.

Touche. We're all doomed. ;)

Nobody. That's the terrifying truth of it. Our system of government is using a popularity contest to put the most charismatic narcissists at the wheel, and then swap them out for a new set every few years.

Probably the closest thing to competent leadership that actually has real power would be bankers and insurance companies. Money make the world go round, and bankers don't lend for anything that can't be insured. So there are some levers there that can move the earth... but ask anybody who has actually rubbed shoulders with the people at the top, and they'll tell you - all these leaders are frighteningly human, possibly even dumber than the average bear.

Look, I know it feels problematic to allow complete BS to go unchallenged on social media, but that's not what these researchers are suggesting. If censorship was an effective method to halt the spread of stupid behavior, then maybe we would have to have a debate on whether the benefits of censorship by tech giants outweighs the good.

However, these findings match what many of us should know intuitively, and what many thinkers have pointed out over the years. The way to deal with bullshit isn't to hide it and run away like you're scared of it, or to ignore it. Call it out, and show how and why it is wrong. If we never allow people to encounter bullshit ideas and see how to shut down those bullshit ideas, they just become more and more susceptible to them. It also just lends ammunition and motivation to the persecution complex of the idiots out there.

The fundamental problem is that it has been so damn profitable for people to lie and mislead. So yes, demonetize, yes, flag the BS, yes, highlight fact checkers and credible counterarguments, but censoring it just makes the problem worse.

Except that coronaviruses are extremely common, and the primary thing that made COVID dangerous is that it was a novel coronavirus, and soon COVID will stop being novel. Mutating to become more contagious/less deadly was kind of expected, just because that's what most coronaviruses end up as. We don't see any coronaviruses out in the wild that behave like smallpox and stay consistently deadly for centuries, but we see many, many examples that cause common colds. Lo and behold, omicron appears and seems to be following the exact same trend.

Could COVID mutate inside of another animal and then come back to us as a different and more deadly disease? Sure, but so could any other coronavirus floating around out there, or bird flu, or swine flu, or something entirely different. We shouldn't let our guard down, but we don't need to maintain permanent panic mode forever.

Skipping college has a cost, for the workforce that can actually benefit from a degree. As someone who has seen both sides of the coin (worked for several years, went back to college for the degree), the jobs I've been able to get with a degree are insanely better - there's no comparison between retail/service jobs (the bulk of what's available without a degree) and professional work in STEM fields.

So yes, if someone is going to get a degree in the humanities, it's an open question whether that is going to ever pay for itself. However, if you get a degree in STEM, and better yet, actually use that degree, it's a complete game changer for your career. The work is going to be difficult or impossible for someone without a serious math and science background, and it's stable, well compensated, meaningful work.

If anyone out there is debating college - ignore the naysayers, and do it if it will get you in the door for a high-paying field in an industry you're interested in. My life is SO much better because I got the degree. Also, all education is beneficial just to learn new things and expand your perspective, although do it as cheaply as you can - don't go into insane debt. If you're doing it just because everyone else is, though, or because you think any generic degree is going to guarantee big success - that's dumb, and please don't.

"Viruses don't always get less deadly over time" is not the same thing as "viruses get more deadly over time".

There's one massive change that's about to happen thanks to Omicron - COVID is going to stop being a novel disease for the human race. Everybody will have been exposed. There won't be any naive immune systems left for COVID to run rampant in.

Don't forget, a coronavirus is just a category of virus, and mostly tends to cause seasonal colds. All the coronoviruses that float around and mostly cause minor inconvenience, taking a sick day here and there, may have at one time been as deadly or more deadly than COVID. One of the main reasons that the things that infect us continually don't kill us is because our immune systems recognize them and shut them down before they can become a problem.

And, just look at the average infectivity of all coronaviruses, and what we see with COVID. All things being equal, you would expect COVID to start behaving more and more like a standard coronavirus, because of regression to the mean, and because of acquired immunity.

We aren't out of the woods yet. But the smart money says that we will be soon.