They've known for a while now, and been talking about it for well over a year.

On Jan 1 2020 a new IMO (International Maratime Organization) regulation went into effect. The shipping industry drastically lowered the sulfur content of its fuels and the SOx content of ship exhaust plumes dropped by about 77%. (Other aspects of the fuel change also reduced some particulate pollution, too.)

The COVID sequestration also reduced shipping (and cloud-seeding exhaust from it), along with aircraft contrails and upper-atmosphere dust, and dust-generating industrial processes and transportation activity, which (like volcanic dust) also reflect sunlight over the ocean and lower temperatures.

I've seen claims that the reduction in ship exhaust plumes, alone, are enough to account for ALL the sea temperature rise since 2020, and that with the low-sulfur fuel in continued use the bulk of that excess heating will continue even as activity ramps up post-COVID.

Regarding the "hockey stick" graph. (Taking absolutely no position on whether Mann was honest or not, competent or not, etc.)

I was under the impression that the Hockey Stick graph had been shown to be defective as an indicator of warming, primarily because it took tree ring data as one of its proxies for temperature, but carbon dioxide concentration increases alone have been shown to substantially promote tree growth even in the absence of temperature increases. So how much of the sudden rise in the graph is from temperature increase (if any) and how much just from increased CO2 levels is unknown.

But I don't have any links to reliable scholarly articles examining this issue. Do any of you?

"changing perceptions" through marketing? that sounds like an arms race with the other side. Long time ago we thought the right way to change perceptions was through good education and development of critical thinking skills.

Where did it all go wrong :)

It all went wrong when each sides of the discussion concluded that scientific papers supporting the other side were marketing fake-news, trying to gaslight them into supporting a scam to let the opposing side acquire money and/or power, rather than actual science.

Warmists think evidence against any aspect of their side's story is akin to smoking research sponsored by tobacco companies. Skeptics think any evidence for a global warming story has been corrupted, ala early drug war research on psychedelic drugs, to feed government power grabs and attempts to put rent-seeking taxes on commerce (e.g. Gore's carbon-credit exchange).

Now neither side believes academic papers on the subject. We'll just have to wait and see what the climate does.

Following this paper's prescription, of course, would just put the nail in the coffin on any remaining hope of convincing the population to pay attention to the sort of propaganda it prescribes. (Assuming the very existence of the paper hasn't already done that.)

Flight time is about 20 years. (Proxima is about 4 light years away and the swarm is averaging about 1/5th lightspeed.) I suspect even some of us boomers can hang in here that long - even if life-extension treatments don't become available.

Oops. Maybe not. They're talking about 75 years before getting around to a launch.

I'll be surprised if the project stays funded, since even without delays everyone funding it will die before there's any payoff.

Flight time is about 20 years. (Proxima is about 4 light years away and the swarm is averaging about 1/5th lightspeed.) I suspect even some of us boomers can hang in here that long - even if life-extension treatments don't become available.

Also, I wonder what it will cost to fund the laser for half a century.

The launch and acceleration of the whole swarm is over in about a year. Individual elements are up to speed in much less than that.

(You HAVE to do it fast: Once they're moving they're out of range darned quick, so you have to get them to cruising speed before you can't hit them any more. Fortunately the little motes are really sturdy so you can give them a BIG big push.)

Read The Paper.

You cannot aim sufficient energy over distances like that
[description of betavoltaic battery run off "interstellar wind" of high-speed travel]

Oh, yes...

You CAN aim the propulsion energy well enough for long enough to get them up to 20%ish of lightspeed. After that the energy is stored in their momentum relative to that of the interstellar gas. You don't have to keep powering them from home and there's far more than you need to power them for the rest of the mission.

(I happen to know one of the people involved.)

You cannot aim sufficient energy over distances like that

They were originally intended to be powered by betavoltaic batteries (solar cell sandwich with a charged particle emitter for the peanut butter - like the "radioactive diamond" batteries but with Strontium 90 for the radiation source). But another dude computed what local interstellar hydrogen looked like when treated as a proton/electron beam at 20% of light speed and concluded no other radiation source would be necessary - by a long shot. Just launch with the supercaps charged and you're up to power-generation speed long before they're discharged. You only harvest a fraction of that energy - the "solar cells" are far to thin to stop many of the protons but they make lots of electron-hole pairs on the way through - and you use heavy atoms (much charge per atom) in their semiconductor structure to maximize that. That gives you plenty of power to run the computer, sensors, and attitude control. Also the transmitters to phone home, with several watts total over the surviving portion of the swarm.

and you can't slow these gram-weight "robots" down with this propulsion system.

Sure you can. That not-quite-relativistic hydrogen wind through the radiation battery gives you enough friction, when combined with attitude adjustments, to bring the swarm into proper formation and all traveling at the same speed by the time it reaches the target. (You launch it over a considerable period, with the later ones faster than the earlier ones so they all arrive at the same time.) It's slowed a bit by encounter time, but not by very much. So it has to look fast as it flies by.

Timestamp doesn't match if the signing is done by remote server, which at least some of these services have been doing.

A camera that has to be connected to the internet and a remote timeserver/signature generator to record and sign a picture? JUST what I DON'T want to press "take picture" on in a war zone.

Can't you just imagine an automatic "hear the camara talk to the net, identify its location, and hand that to the weapons aiming system" device, and how deploying that would affect war reporting?

What's the solution for storage outside of pressure vessels or cryogenics?

Metal Hydrates (e.g. 1:3 palladium/silver alloy).

How about this then: Enough fraudulent takedowns and the copyright is revoked and becomes public domain.

Unfortunately the trolls aren't always the owner of the copyright or acting with the owner's permission or in the way they told the owner they'd "protect" his/her interests.

... if [companies like Google] find that someone is abusing DMCA requests, they absolutely do have a right to sue the abuser. Google has done this at least once, and rather recently, at that.

They should use it as a revenue source. Troll the bogus-DMCA trolls for $ome big buck$.

Maybe let the people hit by the bogus takedowns join the suits as co-plaintifs, boosting the bite by THEIR damages and giving THEM a cut of the swag. (Provide running and lawering the suit as a service, for a cut of the winnings-if-any for any co-plaintifs who want to sign up for that rather than run their own lawyers. Google: win, Co-plaintifs: win, Trolls: LOSE!

An elephant in the room is the efficiency, Solar electricity through electrolyser and fuel cell to power for the forklift (including electronics such as max-power-point trackers for solar panels) vs. equivalent devices (inverters, charge controllers, etc.) for alternatives such as battery-electric.

LFP and several other lithium battery systems are now 93-97% efficient round trip from solar or line input to line-equivalent AC. Going to motor control should be at least that good. Last I heard, electrolyzer/fuel cell systems were nowhere near that. Charging time vs. refueling time issues can be handled by swapping low battery packs with fresh ones on chargers. (The packs-on-chargers can also do time-shifting for shifts during no-sun periods.)

I hear now NASA used to find hydrogen leaks was by having a worker hold up a big sheet of cardboard as he walked forward. When it caught fire he'd found the leak. Hydrogen burns with an almost invisible (in sun or bright light) but VERY hot flame and "There's no such thing as a hydrogen leak that's NOT on fire." after non-trivial time.

Banning high-sulfur fuels in cargo ships was a good move when it comes to reducing acid rain - but it became obvious very quickly that the ocean-spanning clouds seeded by the resulting sulfur dioxide had been causing a powerful global cooling effect, and removing them is nearly doubling the rate at which the planet is warming.

In particular, as of a couple months ago the climate scientists were estimating that the sulfur cleanup driven ship track reduction was more than enough to explain ALL of the ocean surface temperature rise during the last two years.

US-ians hate the idea that something everybody wants can't be owned and used for profit-making.

"US-ians" understand that if you can't own it, you can't keep others from taking it away from you/.